


A Differing Lot

by disenchanted



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Royalty, Incest, M/M, Supporting Character Death, Underage Sex, fictionalized non-magical world, mid-20th century
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-25
Updated: 2014-04-25
Packaged: 2018-01-20 16:56:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 74,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1518146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thor was born to become a king. Loki was born to become nothing; he becomes something anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Differing Lot

**Author's Note:**

> Writing this fic has been a long, strange journey. Thank you to everyone who put up with me while I wrote it. Thanks especially to Meg, who convinced me to watch the Thor movies--I'm eternally grateful for it.
> 
> A few notes about the content: the underage tag applies only to Part II, The Wood, in which Thor and Loki are 16-18 and 17-19. From the beginning of Part III on, they are both over eighteen. In addition to an off-screen death of a supporting character, there are references to the past deaths of minor characters.

The gods to each ascribe a differing lot:  
Some enter at the portal. Some do not!  
 _Ford Madox Ford._

##  _the wheel_

Through the windows of the Long Hall, Loki saw that it was raining. The cloud-light cooled the red-and-gold of the Hall; now and then, lightning flickered in the shields, the swords, and the suits of armor. When thunder followed, Loki clutched to the hem of Frigga's dress, and crowded himself against the backs of her legs.

'Loki,' she said, reaching down a hand to dislodge him. 'You goose, the thunder is only noise.'

'Pick me up,' he demanded.

'Dear, you've grown so much that I don't know if I can.' When his chin trembled, she said, 'It's better for you to grow. After you've grown for a while longer, you shall be as tall as Papa, or taller. You will like that, won't you?'

'Is Loki afraid of the thunder again?' Thor was calling out down the length of the Hall. From the end of it he came bounding, leaping, his footsteps soft in the carpet. 'You're beastly slow,' he said, when he reached them, stumbling as he stopped. 'I want to see the jewels.'

'I am not _afraid_ ,' Loki said; but Thor was sprinting the stretch of the Hall, again, towards the double doors that opened onto the Collection Room.

The room, when they entered, was dark and temperate. The walls had been draped in black, and small spotlights are placed at precise angles; when Loki happened to look into one, white light prickled against his eyes, and forced him to turn his head. He saw, then, what the fingers of the spotlights pointed towards.

Walking between the cases was descending through a cave of riches; there was nothing but beauty, seeming to Loki interminable. Golden laurels with pearls inlaid, or a snuffbox panelled in coral and turquoise. A necklace of interlocked cameos, whose classical scenes had been whittled into the slick, pink canals of a seashell. A tiara which mimicked a wreath of acanthus, twining into and over itself, nephrite and green agate like leaves wet by rain. … At last, a crown of eight diamond arches bridged by helices of etched glass, looping downwards to join at the ruby set in the silver circlet.

'Your Papa wore that,' Frigga said, 'on the day of his coronation. You've seen it in pictures.'

Loki pressed a finger against the glass between himself and the crown. 'Tell them to take it out,' he told Frigga, 'that I might put it on my shelf. I should like to put it next to my telescope.'

Frigga's hand—slim, smooth, smelling of rose-hips and cold-cream—stroked through his hair. 'It doesn't belong to us,' she said. 'None of this does. We've borrowed it, sometimes, when we've needed, but it doesn't belong to us. It belongs to Asgard.'

'But Asgard belongs to us.'

'We're only taking care of it,' she told him, 'and helping to make it better, when we can. No, Asgard belongs to itself.'

'Will it not belong to Thor, when he is king?'

'Oh, my darling. Thor shall belong to Asgard, when he is king.'

'And what shall I belong to?'

The sweep of Frigga's hand faded. Resting her hand on his shoulder, she said, 'You will belong to Asgard, just the same as Thor. You will simply belong to it in your own manner.'

The room faded inwards from the corners of itself, blackening like burnt paper, till all that Loki saw was the crown's coruscation. It had shone for so long in that dark room; now he was looking upon it, or it was looking upon him. He felt the urge to spear it, as if it were a story-monster: break into the belly of it, spill its bones. He wanted to put the shining pieces onto the flat of his tongue; he wanted to tear his lips on the glass, and swallow the shards, and swallow the rubies.

He was hungry as he was hungry for venison, and veal marrow, and suckling pig—the tastes which he loved, but which seemed to belong to the tongues of the good people, the tall people, his mother and father, who wore the jewels from the Collection Room, and ate at banquets.

'You will eat at the banquets someday,' his mother would tell him, as he nibbled at the left-overs sent from the kitchens; but 'someday' hadn't any meaning. There was a lack in him. There would be a lack in him for a long time yet.

 

* * *

 

The Royal Palace in Valhalla he thought of as a nesting doll. The gardens and grounds, blooming green from the limestone and brick of the city centre, made up the facade first seen. Beyond the facade were the outer rooms, running the length of the eastern face, glistening with pearl and gilt-wood. Those were the rooms that were given morning light, and so were clean and bright as sun over snow.

Beyond the western face stood the state rooms, out of which sprung a profusion of ornamental plaster and silk damask, coffered ceilings and velvet drapes. Turkish carpets rested beneath the clutch of claw-feet. Wood was mahogany or black lacquer, or oak veneered in ebony; tables were topped with brocatelle marble, red and white like raw meat. Esteemed guests paraded through the Long Hall, in which the arms and armor were kept, before taking dinner in the State Dining Room, in which ten chandeliers, hung in double rows, seemed bonfires crystallized.

After all of those outer shells had been opened and tossed away, one came to the core of the Palace. The residence was a disappointment, found hiding at the heart of such pomp. In all rooms the wallpaper was the color of an almond; in all rooms the furniture was a stew of styles. The carpet was worn and the drapes were faded. There was very little gilding.

Through such plain rooms moved the sum of a thousand years of effort. Axes had gone through skulls, spears had gone through stomachs, poison had gone into cups—all of that for Odin to live, to rule, to pad from the library to the kitchen in search of a cup of tea. Ships had launched into battle, that Thor might chase Loki beneath a worn sofa in the queen's sitting room, threatening him with a feather-duster. Tanks had trundled over barren earth, pressing through wire and bone, that Loki might hide beneath Thor's bed and leap out at him from the shadows, brandishing a toy dagger.

Asgard's soil was clotted with the corpses of men who had died blessing the king, and the king's sons, and the king's sons' sons. So it was. In time, those sons, too, would give something of themselves to the future.

 

* * *

 

At the palace in Valhalla, Loki was the least happy. He refused to bathe, and sometimes tried to trip his nurse into the bath she had prepared for him; when he was forced in, he splashed soapy water onto the floor, and threw his sponge to the end of the room, so that Nurse had got to retrieve it for him. He and Thor shirked their lessons, and peered out of the window of Odin's library to watch the little lackeys spotting the inner courtyard, hastening from one quadrant of the palace to another. Loki found out how to unlatch the windows, so that he and Thor could throw wads of paper into the court; when they were tired of that, they tossed the paper at each other.

For playmates, they had the children of Odin's brothers, with whom they walked through the public parks. The girls had bows in their hair, and wore crisp pleated skirts, and the boys had ties and waistcoats. They were keenly aware that they were being photographed; out of a sense of national duty, Thor and Loki held their cousins' hands.

They made believe, when out of sight of the cameras: armed with sticks and rocks, they chased each other over hills, around trees, onto boulders and statues, feigning the wars their fathers had fought. Loki was cast, unavoidably, as the Jötnar foot-soldier, brutish and dim, who succumbed to the nobler Aesir. 'You've got to be the Jotun,' they would say. 'You do look like one.' Some son of a count, some daughter of a baron, would force Loki against a tree, blindfold him with a monogrammed handkerchief, and play at executing him by firing squad. They held long sticks like rifles, and cheered when he slumped to the ground.

He was happier to be alone with Thor, after seeing other children, and so came to enjoy their cousins' visits—not for the cousins, but for the day or two of utter relief that came after their departure. As soon as they were left alone, Loki would climb into Thor's bed and curl up against him. He unworked Thor's braid, and complained about the cousins, and complained that Thor defended them.

'We would be devilish bored without them,' Thor said, and Loki laughed.

When alone, they played in the palace gardens, where the air was sweet with soil and nectar; Thor and Loki tussled in the grass, and smeared each other in dirt, and uprooted yellow orchids to take to their mother. Rather than put them in vases to wilt, Frigga pressed the flowers in books. She showed the pressings, once, to Loki, and let him hold them in his palm.

He stroked a faded petal with his fingertip, wanting to feel it, and found that it tore away. The petals, layered over each other, stuck to his palms; he had to peel them away with his fingernails. It did not occur to him that he could ever uproot another yellow orchid. He wept, later, in a feeble spatter, and she comforted him without asking what he had done.

 

* * *

 

At nine o'clock in the evening, most evenings that they were in residence at the palace, Frigga put them to bed. She set cups of hot lemon water at their bedsides, and tucked their plush horses beneath their duvets, and read from children's books of Aesir tales. In them, little golden-headed princes, and fine kings and queens, and warriors and giants, lived in worlds circling an eternal tree, which reached its roots into the pool of the universe...

That, Frigga said, was what their people believed, a very long time ago. Now they understood a little more about the world. There was a famous observatory in the mountains to the north of Valhalla, and Asgard's scientists were developing technology that could put men into orbit round the earth. Thor told her that he would be a cosmonaut.

'You're going to be the king of Asgard,' she said, nestling his plush horse against his shoulder, letting her fingers linger on the fabric of his pyjama shirt. 'When you _are_ king, you might choose to help the cosmonauts travel. It costs a terribly large amount of money to go to outer space, and having the king's attention might help them raise the money they need.'

'Yes,' he told her, 'and I shall go with them, too.'

'Perhaps you shall,' she said. 'By the time you are grown, they might have found out a way to pop over to Jupiter or Venus, just like taking the train into the country.'

'I'll do it.' Loki rose up from his morass of bedclothes. 'I'm not going to be the king—so I can do what I like.'

'Well,' Frigga said. She smoothed her fingers over the stretch of linen by Thor's head, in the way she touched things when she was thinking. 'Well.'

After she had gone, Loki watched the pattern of stars that the night-light cast against the wall. By this gem-like, many-colored light, he could see Thor's back, turned away, rising and falling in sleep, and the fall of his hair against his pillow, painted over by the circling stars.

 

* * *

 

They discovered, once, a sliding panel in the wall of their mother's sitting room. The panel opened onto a small vestibule, white-walled, with a single chair and a little landscape hung above it. Beyond the chair and the landscape, a second door delivered them into one of the state rooms: the Blue Drawing Room, whose wallpaper was such vivid turquoise that it seemed they had fallen to the depths of some tropical sea.

'Let's go back,' Loki said. 'We'll be in awful trouble.'

Thor, unfeeling, climbed onto one of the sofas. From there he leapt onto a table, his socked feet slipping against the marble top of it. 'We'll go back in a minute,' he said. 'Loki, come here. Let's make believe. … This table is a boat. And everything else is the ocean; so now you're drowning, and you have got to climb on the boat.'

Loki felt his feet soaked in water. He took a stumbling leap onto the table, and fell against Thor, who held him upright. Waves churning and crashing, foam flecking. Loki thought of the way the sea looked at the northern coast, black and unvarying, stilled against the horizon. He curled his fingers into the fabric of Thor's jumper and peered over his shoulder, looking out through the dust-motes and the shafts of sunlight. With a great heave he pushed Thor from the table, so that he tumbled onto the carpet.

Coolly, he said, 'Man overboard.'

Thor laughed, and pretended to be sucked into a whirlpool; so Loki laughed, too, though his stomach turned, because he knew he ought to do what Thor did. He looked down to Thor writhing on top of the carpet, and thought of watching the gold stroke of his body eaten up by a pinwheel of surf.

 

* * *

 

At their place by the fjord, they really did swim. High on the snow-capped mountains, spruces furred over the creases and bulges of the land; the summer cottage sat on a slope of trimmed grass, which dropped suddenly into the long, flat mirror of the water.

He and Thor leapt from the little pier, or waded through the algae which floated in the shallows, and backstroked out to the center of the fjord. They sung snatches of American songs they had heard on the radio, just to hear their voice go out into the vastness. Their father took them out on the yacht; they dived off of it, into the deepest water, where it was black and still. Sometimes a shoal of fish slipped fluidly beneath them, shimmering like the scales of a snake. They would float up through the shoal and surface shivering, shouting, slipping wet hands over the rungs of the yacht's ladder.

Thor would say, 'I can hold my breath for a minute,' and Loki would say, 'I can hold mine for two.' Thor would say, 'I can swim all the way to that rock,' and Loki would say, 'I can swim all the way to the opposite shore.' Then they tested each other.

Thor dipped his head just beneath the water, mouth shut, fingers at his nose, and Loki pulled at his hair, goading him to surface. When Loki went beneath, he counted the seconds precisely, till at ninety-five he saw white flecks at the edges of his vision and rose, hair tangled over his eyes, crying, 'Let me go again, it's not fair, a fish touched my foot and it made me breathe in.' When beginning their race, they counted down from three; towards Thor's splashing, the red bumps of his feet kicking up through the spray, Loki shouted, 'It was three-two-one- _go_ , not three-two- _one_!' At the opposite shore, Thor greeted him with a clasp of the shoulder and a gap-toothed smile.

If Odin and Frigga were not entertaining guests, Thor and Loki dozed on the sofas in the front room, which had a wall of windows and was unbearably sunlit; they buried their faces in the cushions, so that they saw darkness but felt the sun-warmth on their backs. They swung in and out of dreams, which were more like reminiscences: the blue sky, and algae slick beneath their feet, and the endless downwards hurtling of a good dive. After surfacing from such natural beauty, the pine-wood and pale upholstery of the cottage felt false and demanding.

When rested, they tumbled up to dress for dinner, which was fresh salmon with dill, or mussels in white wine sauce, or small prawns smeared with mayonnaise. During those meals they were the most like a usual family. Besides the man posted by the door, and the people who whispered in ghost-like to distribute the dishes, they were alone together.

Odin told them stories of the time before he was king—of flying over a rainforest in a hot air balloon, or running out of petrol on a drive through the desert, or hunting polar bears and arctic fox through Asgard's tundra. By the end of the meal, he would have got drunk, and promised Thor and Loki that he would take them hunting, someday. Always for dessert they ate strawberries and cream.

Thor and Loki ate strawberries, too, when they lounged on the spread of grass between the house and the shore, watching their father's boat pull an endless arrow into the water. They sat up to wave to Odin when he passed near, then settled again onto their backs. Thor balanced the basket of strawberries on his chest, so that they could lie with their sides pressed together.

In the space between their bodies, they laced their hands together and felt their fingers twitch with the tickle of the grass. Rather than have Loki reach over him, Thor plucked strawberries from the basket and fed them to Loki, who bit at the fruit till only the stems were left pressed between Thor's thumb and forefinger. Sometimes, with seed-flecked teeth, Loki nipped at the tips of Thor's fingers, scraping the skin of them red.

 

* * *

 

Odin began, the summer Thor was twelve, to take Thor for walks into the mountains. They set out with stick and pack and a bevy of Odin's men—those men carried things like sleeping sacks and camping stoves and compasses, as if Odin or Thor could step off the path without the King's Guard despatching to rescue them—to follow a trail just north of the house, which swallowed them into the spruces. Late in the afternoon, past tea, they returned sweat-soaked and powdered with dirt, their hair stuck to their shining foreheads, the cuffs of their pants spattered with mud.

Sometimes, after those walks, Thor would smile to himself, as if at a joke remembered. At other times he went about with his face cast down, self-consciously contemplative. Loki thought Thor looked at him strangely, and then wondered whether it wasn't because he looked strangely at Thor.

When Thor returned, the first time, he was sent immediately to bathe. As he scrubbed away the sweat and dirt, Loki sat on top of the vanity in the bath, idly inspecting the soaps set about him. He lifted up a bar, sniffed it, made a face, and set it down.

There was pine tar for itches and rashes, and lavender to soothe tantrums; beyond that, the staff had given Thor bars of sandalwood and cedar and juniper. Loki requested rose soap, usually, because it smelt like Frigga. He longed for that scent then, as sandalwood rose up through the steam of Thor's bath.

'What did he tell you?' he asked. He held a bar of soap in his hands, and kept his face tilted down at it, but looked sidelong at the bath. 'Secrets?'

'I don't know that they were secrets,' Thor said. 'He talked about the war. What I'm to do if there's a war when I'm king.'

'Well, what is it?'

Thor, with the air of reciting a passage translated from a dead language, said, 'One has got to be diplomatic, for the good of one's own people, as often as it is possible; but if there is great human suffering one might do something, so long as one determines that one can remove it without causing greater suffering.'

'What bosh,' Loki said. He set down the soap. 'Papa liked the war; he liked killing Jötnar. He wasn't thinking about suffering.'

'He said he remembers it with a grave heart.'

'He said that in a public address, on the anniversary of the armistice.'

Thor shifted in his bath, stirring the water audibly. Already he had the look of having an overgrown conscience; his was an organ so swollen it obstructed the other, more necessary ones. Thus the palpable sorriness when he felt Loki was being harmed, even though it oughtn't to have mattered to him that Loki had been left out of things.

'No,' Thor said, 'he said it to me, too. On our walk, just today.'

'Doesn't that give it away, about the rest of what he's told you?'

'I don't know what you mean.'

'I mean everything else he said would have been just as dishonest.'

'If he was lying to me, why did he bother to tell it to me privately?'

With a heave of a sigh, Loki said, 'Never mind.'

It was humid in the bath, and his hair was damp and curling; his clothes were sticking to his skin. Beyond that discomfort he felt a plunging desire to warm himself in a bath of his own. How nice it would have felt to be submerged in hot, clean water.

He felt, along with that desire, the irritation of having so obviously coveted. He decided that he would go to the library to read until dinner, and so lowered his legs till he slid off of the vanity. The soles of his bare feet pressed into the fog gathered on the tile; he left footprints as he crossed to the door.

'Let's swim after dinner,' Thor called out. Loki heard it through the door, which he had shut.

 

* * *

 

The windows in the library faced the upwards slope of the mountain. The empty, airy space above the books and the desks was diffuse in the dim light; the cedar beams faded into the shadows. Only the fire glowed, steadfastly.

'It is...' Odin, when he was serious, carved words out of his lexicon as if carving a piece of meat; the aim was to get at the choicest phrase. In this careful, carving manner, he said, 'It is an unusual burden. I feel, on the whole, quite grateful to shoulder it. I had had a moment in my youth...in which I felt it would have been better if it hadn't been forced upon me. I expect your brother will feel the same, for a time, before coming round to it.

'Because you've not felt the dread of the inevitability of it, you imagine you should feel very happy, were you in a different position. … But'—Odin was squinting at Loki through the monocle he kept in his good eye—'you've not felt the dread of the inevitability of it. I know your sort of discontent, Loki. You would push against your fate. You would feel you hadn't the power to do as you pleased.'

'It would be what I pleased.' Loki sat upright. 'It's the only thing that would please me.'

'You ride in the mornings,' Odin said, 'when the fog is just drawing up. You sketch at midday, when, you say, the light is least sentimental. On cool spring days you take picnics in the gardens. In the winter you prefer to be in the north, where you might ride in the snow, or be taken out on a sleigh. When you have exerted yourself, you rest before the fire, and sleep till you are called to dress for dinner. When you are reading, you insist upon being let alone. This is what pleases you.'

'I would have all that, still.'

Odin removed his monocle, and looked at Loki directly. His eye, so blue it seemed blind, was watery and roving; with an effort it fixed on Loki, and held.

'I,' he said, 'do not.'

'Then Thor shall lose what he likes, too.'

'Thor shall lose what is irrelevant to his function. He will keep what beloved things fit into the meter of his kingship.'

'He hasn't anything relevant to his function!' Loki leapt from his chair, launched by his force of feeling. 'You know Thor is an animal. —No, don't tell me I'm rash! I won't hear it. He is a dumb, swollen beast, who has learnt just enough to have got it into his block that goodness is the little prize he ought to lope towards. But you won't say a word against him.'

His blood seemed to have inflamed, and pressed out against the insides of his veins; his skin pulsed in even, momentous tolls; he sweated as if in a steam bath. Heaving with life, with the working of his body, he stood before his father.

'I am what you had hoped for. It's simply that I've had the bad luck to have been born after Thor. And so you don't mind about me; you would only mind about me if Thor were to die. You might have kept me locked in a room, for all that I am worth. Why bother telling me about the world? Why bother bringing me into the world?'

For all that Loki had said, he hadn't driven in the stake. Odin sat impassively. Perhaps a slight puzzlement reddened his cheeks; perhaps the summer had reddened his cheeks. The room stood cool and dim as ever.

'If this is your form response to an injustice,' Odin said, 'I wonder how you would think of achieving anything at all. You could hardly be trusted with public addresses, lest they dissolve into passionate shouting...'

A chuckle crackled in the center of his chest. Laughing to himself, he replaced his monocle, and took up the portfolio he had been looking over.

'I've work to do,' he went on, 'though you mightn't have guessed it. Run along and find your brother. He will want to swim, won't he?'

All of the shaking, the sweating, the pressing blood, the working pulse, centered at Loki's throat, where it seemed to catch, like a small bone. He tried to cough it up, and felt that he sobbed; he squinted, and wrenched the muscles of his face, and wrung tears out of his eyes. He saw, through the tears, that Odin grew a little redder.

'You don't want to know which one of us is better.' His voice seemed to scrape up through his chest. 'You don't want to see it. You're happy. You're happy that Thor is the eldest, because you love him the best.'

'You make a fool of yourself,' Odin said. 'Thor makes a fool of himself, in his own way. What can be said in Thor's favor is that he does not choose it for himself. If he learns enough to know better, he will do better. Whatever wrong _you_ have done, whatever wrong you will do, you will always know better than to do it.'

He turned to his portfolio, and in a silent dismissal, fluttered one hand towards the double doors. Loki hadn't the courage, yet, to disobey; he went through the doors, trembling.

 

* * *

 

Under the endless sun of a midsummer night, Thor and Loki sat together on the shore opposite the cottage, cool brown pebbles beneath them, cool black water rocking towards their toes.

Dragging a stick through a cluster of seaweed, Thor said, 'You've upset Papa.' It was not an accusation, but a gentle recognition, meant to draw open a space in which Loki might speak for himself.

'He told me I make a fool of myself.' Loki plucked a pebble from the shore, and cast it out over the water; he could not quite tell where it slipped in. The whole of the water rippled. 'He said that you do, too, only you're too stupid to know better.'

'I don't mind making a fool of myself, if I feel I ought to do.'

'That's what he means to say. It isn't about doing what one ought to do; it's about making oneself look the least foolish. Asgard only minds about us when we've made it look silly.'

'It minded that we did fight against the Jötnar. That was what we ought to have done, and we did it, and the people were glad for it. The Jötnar were—criminals, and madmen. Our people would have been furious if we'd not gone to war.'

'Yes, and if we'd not gone to war we'd have looked foolish.'

'So one is bound to look foolish whether one does the right thing or the wrong thing. If so, isn't it better to do the right thing anyway, and cross one's fingers that it'll turn out nicely?'

'One is bound to look foolish if one does a foolish-making thing. One has got to avoid that, mostly. Righteousness hasn't a thing to do with kingliness.'

'You're dismal,' cried Thor, tossing a length of seaweed towards Loki.

The seaweed clung to Loki's hair; Loki clawed at it, tumbling sideways into Thor's lap, dragging him down to thrash among the wet pebbles. Shrieks and splashes rang up against the angle of the cliff-side and out over the length of the water, where shards of the low sun floated.

 

* * *

 

Frigga began to look after Loki specially. He had grown his hair out, in the Aesir manner, and she offered to brush it for him; he wouldn't let Nurse touch his hair, but never had the discipline to work the knots out of the back. Those Frigga combed out gently, with much application of oil; she put a soothing hand to his shoulder as she tugged through the thickest of the tangles. He accepted it passively, closing his eyes, letting his head loll and tilt with the motion of the brush. She did not, he knew, do this for Thor.

While she brushed, she told him about old Asgard: that in 1358 the Countess of Idavoll bought the Archbishop of Valhalla for a tiger and a hundred pounds of gold, or that in 1540 the mad King Meili ordered his adviser to burn him alive on his throne. Practical history, too: how the Vanir broke, then resumed, their allegiance to the Aesir, or how the Aesir won the sea battle which would turn the course of the war against the Jötnar. Odin had served as a lieutenant on the HMS Hlidskjalf; it was on the Hlidskjalf, a week before the end of the war, that he had lost his eye. So many years ago, the people thought a crown prince ought to have been allowed to bleed, perhaps to die.

After she told the story of the end of the war, Frigga began to say, 'Your father—'

'Was only Crown Prince Odin,' Loki said, 'when we won the war. I know.'

'He was twenty-five,' Frigga told him. 'Oh, do keep your head straight, darling, I can't brush if you don't. —There we are. … And I was only a girl. I can only faintly remember the war; memories of the rationing, I find, come clearest. When _I_ was eleven years old, I had a birthday cake made of caster sugar and lard. Of course your father was still frightfully young.'

'He wasn't. He was a man.'

'I doubt you shall think so, now; but when you are twenty-five you will see how little prepared you are for what one thinks of as adult life.'

'I'm prepared now.' He said so because he knew she would click her tongue, and shake her head, and smile at him anyway. 'Do you think Thor and I will have a war, when we're older?'

Soothingly, the bristles of the brush passed against his scalp. Frigga lingered in the way that he liked, and said, 'God willing, Asgard will never have war again.'

It was not, for her, an empty platitude. The war had ended when she was young, but there had been the civil war in Jotunheim, and border skirmishes ever since: small, quick eruptions of tension, which killed dozens or hundreds and then were stamped out. Loki was faintly aware that one of Frigga's family—an aunt or a cousin, he thought—had been killed in one of these tussles, long before either he or Thor were old enough to have any awareness of the world. Where Odin turned his rage outwards, Frigga smoothed herself into clever quietness; she did not mourn outwardly, but worked towards peace. Loki supposed it was sentimentality.

'There will always be something to be got through war,' he said. 'I don't see why we're to condemn ourselves to not getting it.'

Loki saw, in the mirror before them, the quiver at the corner of Frigga's mouth. She watched intently the back of his head; her lashes were dark against her cheeks, and her hand at the brush slowed, then stilled, then went its usual path. Crown to scalp to neck to shoulder, again and again, till his curls were loosened and downy to the touch. She stroked her fingers through his hair, after she was finished with the brush; she cupped her hand at his skull.

 

* * *

 

Soon after Thor's voice broke, Odin brought his sons into public life. They debuted in Valhalla, during the sitting of Parliament; they squirmed against the confines of embroidered coats and knee-breeches, ate too much at banquets, and leapt at aquavit when it was offered. Odin's closest allies, his sycophants and his indebteds, like to coddle Thor; they made the sort of obsequious talk which said, above anything, that they were humoring Thor's play at being a man.

Loki felt as if he were a handmaiden to Thor, or a jester. When Odin caught him introducing himself to a person of consequence—Lord Búri, who owned every major newspaper in Asgard, or Egill Grettisson, the oil baron—he would put his hand at Loki's back and guide him towards Thor, who stood drinking wine and scooping caviare from bowls set in the hollows of the ice sculptures.

'What a dull party,' Thor would say, mouth half-full with caviare and crackers.

At one of a hundred receptions, Loki looked over Thor's back and saw the Count of Barri— speaking to Odin, but flicking his eyes for a moment to Loki. It was the sort of look that seemed heavy, weighing the jowls and the eyelids. Loki raised his chin to meet it.

'What did he want?' Loki asked Thor, later.

Thor, taking a salmon-mousse canape from a passing tray, said, 'He wants to be granted permission to develop a piece of protected land.'

'Is that what it was?'

Loki rose up on his toes, and looked over the crowd: out of all the coiled hair and jewellry and sashes, he saw nothing of the Count. He felt a certain thwarted disappointment, and felt it without knowing why he did; so he stopped himself. He took the canape from Thor's hand, and put it into his mouth before Thor could snatch it back.

After champagne had been sipped, and introductions made, there would be dancing. This, most often, was for the sort of person who wanted soon to be married. Sometimes there were dances for the young people: florid, spacious cotillions, in which rings of children in gleaming silk would expand, draw back, merge, intercept themselves, spin out again into pinwheeling petals.

Whichever child found herself arm-in-arm with Thor would flush, or blanch, unsure whether to keep watch over their feet or look into Thor's face. Whichever child found herself arm-in-arm with Loki would give him a courteous nod, and fix her eyes at the floor. Thor and Loki would circle round, inevitably, to each other; turning through, twirling past, they would break a hand from the hand of their partner, and brush teasing fingers along the line of one another's shoulders. Us, they meant, above others.

 

* * *

 

After the 'season' gave its last sputtering sparks, Odin lent the brothers to the wider world: he took them along on a state visit to the United States. Their little jetliner landed in Washington, D.C.; Loki's first impression was of the streetlamps, yellow and regular. They were driven through the streets in a town car, whose tinted windows filtered out the finer details of the view; the city seemed a clean, careful model, which they had been shrunk down in order to visit. The trees were neatly placed, the buildings white and classical.

Odin took them to the headquarters of an aeronautics corporation; the Royal Army, he explained, was commissioning a new batch of reconnaissance aircraft. While Odin spoke to the president of the corporation, a young man in a navy suit and a powder-blue tie showed Thor and Loki a scale model of the aeroplane, stripped of its shell to show the network of wires beneath.

'Our fleet of SSRs should have been retired a decade ago,' Loki said.

'We're waiting,' Thor replied, immoderately pleased that he knew so, 'for the U.S. to replace theirs with Decker RKs, so that we can, too. Papa was telling us at lunch.'

Loki had spent lunch swirling the ice in his ginger ale, watching Thor pretend to listen to Odin telling him about the necessity of reconnaissance missions over certain stretches of Jötunheim. _They_ , Odin said, meaning the unspeakable _they_ , were only quiet when they were gathering their resources, building bombs and raising their armies. The Aesir were obligated—by virtue? Loki wondered—to look in on them, and strike them down before worse.

 _Yes,_ Thor had said. _When I am king, I will strike them all down, every last one of them, so they will never make war, ever again._

Loki said, 'The only reason the U.S. is holding off is because they were accused of being in Avion's pocket. They won't stop being so, but it would be embarrassing for them to prove it; they'll buy reconnaissance craft from Berne-Averill till they're accused of being in Berne-Averill's pocket, then go back to Avion for fighters.'

The young man in the navy suit looked back and forth between Loki and Thor, grasping for words—'Your Highness, it's... It's...'—until Thor saw that he was in pain.

Thor, because he had a mind for mercy, said, 'I've always wanted to meet a pilot. Can't that be arranged?'

 

* * *

 

Past midnight, in the lamp-light of the stagnant, shut-in hours, Loki sat sprawled on a divan in the sitting room of the hotel suite he shared with Thor, writing out an essay for his English tutor. A cup of espresso, on saucer, was balanced at the foot of the divan. Coming up from beneath the sound of the radio—it was one of Mozart's piano sonatas—he heard the sound of socked feet shuffling over parquetry. Thor was coming in from the corridor, wrapped up in a blue dressing gown, his hair let down for sleep.

'I napped earlier, and now I can't sleep.' When he came closer to Loki, he peered at the papers spread over the divan, and, as if biting into a lemon, said, 'You can't be doing lessons.'

'There isn't anything else to do.'

'There's a television.'

'You put it on, then.' Loki lifted his pencil to gesture towards the white half-circle sofa set at the center of the room. 'You can sit there.'

'But you're listening to music.'

Loki reached to the radio on the side table, and the music fell away. The air pulsed with silence—with the whirring of traffic on the street below, and the hum of the air through the vents. When Loki wrote the next word to his essay, the scratch of the pencil against paper was so loud and ugly that he tossed it to the floor.

'It's all right,' Thor said. He turned, but turned slowly, waiting to see if Loki would tell him to stay.

When Thor moved towards the corridor, Loki felt desolation like a fog, blackening the air, seeping into him, into the crevices between the car-whirrs and the vent-rattles. He saw belatedly that he had been lonely, before Thor had come in; and how empty the room would be when he was gone.

'Were you lonely?' Loki asked, watching Thor come to a stop.

'I did want to see you.'

Loki was too proud to pick up the pencil, but he was not too proud to say, 'I'm almost done. The work doesn't matter anyway.'

They curled together on the half-circle sofa, propped up by pillows; they stared through the chatter of _The Night-night Show_. They ordered up tea and platters of biscuits and small cakes, and wiped the crumbs from each other's mouths. Loki tried not to tap his toes to the songs of the musical guests.

'I do like travelling,' Thor said, when they were sleepy enough that they had stopped to see the television as anything but a show of light and sound. 'But I miss Asgard.'

'Patriot,' Loki said. He was resting his head on Thor's shoulder. 'Why do you miss it?'

'I don't know.' He shrugged, and the motion jostled Loki's cheek. 'I'm lonely, when I'm not with our people.'

'Why is that, because no one else knows to be deferential?'

'I know you're only saying that.' Thor reached a hand across, and took Loki's in his, as if Loki were the lonely, homesick one.

Loki was too sleep-heavy to push him away. Weakly, he said, 'No, you don't.'

'I'm lonely when I'm not with you,' Thor said. 'And you haven't got any deference at all.'

Something in Loki's chest felt like a slow, slow firework. Streaks of light languid through him. He felt the texture, the slight dampness, of Thor's palm; perhaps the beat of his pulse. Someone on the television was doing something. He sighed through his nose, closed his eyes, and thought that it would be a feat to open them again—so he let himself rest, waiting for Thor to say, 'The show is over, let me up.'

Loki woke at dawn. He saw the sunrise pale through the translucency of the under-curtains, for the drapes hadn't been closed. Together, he found, he and Thor were curled fetally, according to the curve of the sofa. Thor slept like a stone; Loki nestled next to him, listening to the breath inside of his body, waiting for him to wake.

 

* * *

 

After Washington, D.C., they flew to New York. To Loki it was a revelation. Valhalla was one of those cities that had been layered over itself, like so much paint: for a thousand years it had teemed and crumbled and burnt, and then patched over the hurt places. Manhattan gleamed with infant promise. It seemed a framework into which all of human life, like a bucket of water, had been suddenly spilt. Now that life turned and tumbled within its frame, righting itself.

As their town car idled in traffic, they saw, through the window, the line of the Flatiron edging around the corner of a park. Baubles of light ran up its spine, reaching above the glow of massed taillights. People with shopping bags wove through the stilled traffic; they came close enough to the car that Loki saw the looks on their faces.

What a place, he thought. He wanted to have it.

It could not, he learnt, be had: the people shifted in and out of one's grasp, always changeful and unyielding. The ones who knew who the family were smiled nicely, but did not fall dumbstruck before them. Loki got nothing by condescension, though a little by unrestrained imperiousness: the eternally princely 'Give it here,' or 'I want it,' said to a waiter or a clerk.

Thor had a solidity, a noble bearing; he conveyed well enough that he went unmarked by opinion, even when he wasn't seen for what he was. He smiled equally at the abrasive and the pleasant. When someone jostled him in the street, he said, 'Excuse me.' Probably people thought, _He looks like a prince,_ and meant 'prince' as 'a boy who will be king.'

 

* * *

 

On their fifth night, Odin hosted a dinner to commemorate the family's partnership with a New York-based international charity. The guests numbered in the hundreds, and seemed, clustered around circles of white tablecloth, to be birds gathering at feeders. At each table, a glass-sculpture centerpiece glistened in the muted light. Odin made a speech about the necessity of affordable water purification technology; he finished to a gentle applause, washing through the black-and-shimmer of the ballroom.

They ate Ossetra caviare with finger limes, duck foie gras with huckleberries and apple peel, butter poached lobster, artichoke gratin on truffle brioche, rabbit stuffed with chanterelle mushrooms and apricot purée. Loki patted his mouth with a napkin; Thor surreptitiously licked his fingers.

'Slovenly,' Loki whispered, and Thor flicked over a raspberry, which pecked Loki on the cheek and dropped to the floor. He tried to kick Thor under the table, and found that his legs weren't long enough to reach; his toe budged against one of the table legs.

They were warm and sated, even when confined by starched shirt-fronts, and wanted nothing more but to tussle with each other till they were tired and could slide easily to sleep. Odin wanted otherwise; he brought forth the president of the organization.

Thor, clasping both of his hands to hers, said, 'I do admire the work you've done.' As Loki rose to shake hands in turn, he felt the fallen raspberry crushed beneath the toe of his shoe.

By the end of the dinner they were drunk: they had stolen gulps from glasses of wine till they had had nearly a bottle each, and stumbled over their own feet. The ballroom had become something which rolled and roamed and swam around them; the black-and-shimmer spilt into the spaces between the tables, giving exuberant goodbyes.

Odin was off to a _tête-à-tête_ with the president of the organization, and Frigga was meeting an old friend, a senator's wife, for drinks. Loki was faintly aware of Frigga kissing him on the forehead, saying, 'Do drink a glass of water before you sleep, dear.'

Then he was being ferried down some wide, dark street, towards the hotel, Thor with his head lolling against the tinted window of the car; then their guards were depositing them into their suite.

Across the suite—the white leather armchairs, the pale, soft carpeting, the chartreuse ottomans, the brocade pillows—Thor and Loki shed the bits and bobs of black tie. They flung away their bow-ties and their shirt-studs, their cuff-links and their braces, sighing in relief, proclaiming that they wanted to be naked for the rest of their lives. They paraded through the suite in vests and pyjama bottoms, sipping red wine they had taken from the rack in the kitchen. There was a piano in the corner of the sitting room, where Loki muddled through a bit of Bach, trying to beat back Thor's laughter with sheer force of sound.

'You sound,' Thor said, 'like a cat on a— A cat on a violin—'

Loki, slamming his hands on the keys, said, 'You ought to hear yourself speak!'

He found himself, later, pressed against the glass of the picture window, feeling the lights of the city beam through him. He seemed to be halfway through the glass, the spring air thick as liquid around him. The precipice was waiting to be leapt from.

But Thor had got sick; he was in the bathroom with the door flung open, retching and coughing, laughing a little. Loki sat on the edge of the bath and handed over a wet washcloth, when needed; his stomach turned, too, as though he were connected physically with Thor. They did, at least, have the same wine roiling in their stomachs.

'Never again,' Thor groaned. 'Only water, and fizzy drinks.'

'You know full well,' Loki said, 'that you'll be back at it tomorrow. You couldn't keep your hands off of a glass of wine if it burnt you. —Oh, move over, quickly.'

After they had spat most of it up, they sprawled together on the marble floor, squinting up into the soft lights, grousing. Thor rubbed his cheek against the cushion of a bathrobe, and mumbled the chorus to some song he had stuck in his head.

By four o'clock they were wild with exhaustion. They had worked up just enough strength to stumble into Thor's bedroom, where they curled together in a nest of coverings, feeling the world beneath them give violent counterclockwise heaves. Beyond that, Loki felt a gentle happiness about it—that Thor was so silly and drunk, that he and Thor were so silly and drunk together. He cupped Thor's face in his hand, and felt Thor's skin: silken at the cheek, and at the jaw, dotted by his face's first efforts at stubble. He was nuzzling against Loki—what sensuous glory—and humming beneath his breath.

'Loki.' Thor's voice seemed suddenly to be that of a man, full and luxurious, self-assured even when slurring. He said, 'There will never be anyone on earth I will love more than you.'

When they woke—under slats of sunlight, swaddled in skin-scented linen—Loki did not remember. That was the sort of thing that happened to the mind: things slipped out.

 

* * *

 

Together, Loki and Frigga presided over the opening of an exhibition of Aesir-American art. Frigga was gracious enough to allow him to wear, beneath his jacket, a green cardigan, embellished with glass beads and pearls. He glittered alongside the gilt frames. When he looked up to the lights, he felt a surge of memory: dark walls, glass cases, heaps of gems and metals. There was some sadness he couldn't identify; but it was faint, and easily passed over. There were trays of cocktails passing through the crowds; there were hands thrust out to be shook.

To the photographers he glared. It was at Frigga's behest, and her behest only, that he softened to a look of benign studiousness. Those photographs, she told him, would appear in the pages of the _Daily Moon_ , or the _New York Times_ ; it was through those vectors that the family spoke to the more usual world.

'I know, Mummy,' he told her. If he cared for her any less, he would have asked her why he shouldn't have wanted to give a glare or two to the more usual world.

 

* * *

 

In the mild afternoon that followed, Frigga took Thor and Loki to the conservatory garden at Central Park. It was a labyrinth of stately green, of crabapple trees and high-spraying fountains; the three of them wandered the turns of the paths till they were in meditation, reverent.

Curving around the perimeter of the central garden was a wrought-iron arbor, knotted with wisteria vines, which played their hands through the sunlight and shade. While Frigga strolled by the fountain, Thor and Loki ascended the steps to the half-circle walk beneath the arbor. There it was cool and dark and earth-scented. They realized both at once that in the city they had nearly forgot the scent of growing things.

'How was the opening?' Thor asked. He strolled with his hands behind his back; it was a gesture he had learnt from Odin.

Loki, consciously clasping his hands before him, said, 'The people were dull. The art was pretty. Mummy reminded me I'll be in the _Moon_.'

When Thor laughed, Loki forgave him for the hands. 'Are you worried?' he asked.

'Are you? The _Moon_ will only mind about _me_ on a slow day.'

'I haven't anything to be ashamed of,' Thor said.

'You will,' Loki told him. 'Someday.'

'Will I?'

Thor was laughing; he was looking over at Loki with his eyes smile-wrinkled, glimmering in the spots of sun let in through the gaps in the vines. Strands of his hair curved over his left shoulder; their color and shine made him seem as well-grown as any grass or blossom. Loki wanted to pluck and press him.

'You will,' he said; and Thor was laughing, still.

 

* * *

 

When they returned to Asgard, the country was in full winter. New York's gloomy grey gave over to the absoluteness of the Aesir cold. Absolute white, absolute stillness, absolute silence of the white still snow. After a week in merrily-lit Valhalla, they went up to their lodge in the northern mountains, where they were painted over by streaks and streaks of bare aspen.

By the warmth of the fire, they ate pickled herring and beet soup and dense, grainy bread. Once full, Thor and Loki showered and stripped and sat in the sauna, where they lounged on their backs and talked through heat-thick air. When red and sweating, they ran out into the snow, naked, howling into the beyond. They tackled each other into snow-drifts, and tangled in the sticks beneath, embracing each other numbly. For a minute longer they were boys, still: vast and open, reaching their arms out to their fortune.

 

##  _the wood_

As children, Thor and Loki had liked to tromp through the northern country, looking down at unstirred snow. Loki would think that that was what they must have looked like, from far above; someone peering down from the sky would see an expanse of blue-white only faintly varying. Trees and clearings and rivers and hills, covered over by snow, would converge into small masses, falling in and out of shadow and light. Once or twice, the flickering of a fire from the hole of a tent would spark out of the landscape, like a spark seen on the inside of the eyelid.

To imagine it gave him the feeling of holiness. A sense of cosmic duty would enclose him, and he would wander dazedly through the snow, supposing that his destiny would buoy him along to where he ought to have been. The world was such an arrangement of things, infinitely large, infinitely small; he couldn't bother over a thing like footsteps.

Then frost would crust over their furs, and their cheeks would chap with wind. Their nurse, tromping ever behind them, would tell them that they knew they weren't to stray too far. They would never venture farther than five hundred meters from the lodge; but to small boys, that seemed as far as any human could go from the civilized world.

They were aware of something untouched beyond that five hundred meters—huge, ragged pines, cooing owls and wailing foxes—but felt that once they passed the boundary, they would be swept into the unknown, and not returned until they had stolen the gem from the spirit, or beheaded the beast. Well frightened, they would walk over their own footprints, retreating towards the lodge.

 

* * *

 

It was the year Loki began shaving his face, and Thor and Loki sat bundled together in the seat of a red sleigh, sailing wildly into the outer country. Loki saw, blurring past him, a group of four noble boulders, now softened in snow. To see them made him laugh.

'We've passed the boulders,' he said. 'Do you remember? The ones that marked the five hundred meters.'

Thor, glimpsing out from beneath the fluttering fur of his hood, began to laugh, too. 'We'll go double that. Or double that—two kilometers—four!' He shouted this towards the man who drove the sleigh, who told him that he would drive for as long as His Royal Highness pleased.

They drove on, through the long shadows of the winter noon-twilight, through the cross-hatching of snow-laden branches, across the plains of frozen lakes and into the spruces again. The wind pulled back their hoods, so that they felt the full force of sunlight on ice.

'Look,' Thor said, and pointed.

Running alongside the sleigh, several meters out, was a lone wolf, birch-bark in color, coursing fluidly over the ice. When it found itself far ahead, it returned, tracing loops into the snow, keeping apace with the sleigh, seeming to chide that great red beast for its slowness. In time it slipped between the lines of the farther spruces, and was gone.

 

* * *

 

Loki dreamt, once, that he and Thor were lying on the grass near their place at the fjord, their skin bare, their hair loose. Beneath the light of the midnight sun, the snow on the clifftops glowed; the water lapped at the pebbled shore. The cottage stood empty—they knew this—the rest of the world had gone abroad. There was some score to settle between themselves and nature; so they looked up, silent, at the ripened sky.

They turned to each other, and held each other. They had forgotten why they had come to the water; they felt only their bodies, warm in the temperate air, damp with the water of the fjord. Loki felt, fully and truly, the way in which Thor's body was made: the downy hair on his arms, the broadness of his fingers, the curve of muscle in his legs, the soft, tan skin of his stomach.

It was not the sort of dream in which there was speech. He heard, all the same, that it was all right. There was the most extraordinary feeling: a sun bursting out of his stomach, and the rays of light spilling ribbon-like, flooding endlessly.

He woke. He had come in his sleep; he felt the softness of form, the incorporeality, that followed the best sort of finish. The dream had made him long for Thor; he wanted to go to him, and talk to him about nothing.

When he lifted up from his bed, he remembered that Thor was in Vanaheim, with their father. He rose regardless; he cleaned himself, tied a dressing gown over his pyjamas, and went to the window of their bedroom. From it he looked down into the courtyard of the palace; he watched wide flakes of snow wander sideways past him, piling thinly on the grass.

 

* * *

 

Oftener and oftener, Thor was away. At first he went for a day or a weekend in Valhalla, while Loki stayed on at one of the country residences; then for a week or two in Vanaheim or Alfheim, where he played polo with those other princes, and took lunch with their fathers.

The first, shortest trips were bearable sadnesses; Loki would read more than usual, and ride Thor's horses for him. He felt Thor's presence still humming through their bedrooms, the sitting rooms, the gardens and the stables, in the way that he could feel it when Thor was simply out of sight. It was as if Thor was in another room. At night, he and Loki spoke on the telephone for as long as they could manage: he in an armchair in some flower-scented guest room, muttering to stop from being overheard, and Loki lying on his back in Thor's bed, lacing the telephone cable round his forearms.

Loki had the impression then that their parting was anomalous: that Odin had taken Thor along with him on a whim, and would, after the whim had been satisfied, set him back down into the stream of his usual life. He realized otherwise only when he overheard Odin telling Thor to plan for a month's tour of Nidavellir. Then it occurred to him, swiftly: Thor would always go away.

Each parting seemed crueller than the last. Some vital bit was being cut slowly away from him. He thought of martyrs: noseless, earless, fingerless, mindless of their pain. They could bear it because it drew them closer to the thing that they loved. Alone, Loki felt only absence. His thoughts manifested themselves, and then were snuffed out, for there was no one to tell them to. There was Frigga, but he didn't like to tell her the sort of thing that made him seem rotten; only Thor could see Loki fully, and care for even the gangrenous bits.

Loki hid Thor's luggage, and burnt his schedules; he told Thor that Odin had said he wasn't wanted, any longer, and could unpack his things. Odin caught him trying to bribe their driver to refuse to drive Thor to the station. There was that awful scene: Loki, the morning after his birthday, tearing the cloth from the breakfast table, so that plates and glasses tumbled over each other, shattering. Thor nearly throttled him for having upset Frigga. The brothers fought through the corridors of the winter lodge; they pulled each other about by their collars, or dug nails into wrists and tore.

For a month after that, they were separated. Thor wrote Loki a dozen apologies—blunt, ungainly, scrawled with a biro on Claridge's stationery. Loki tossed the letters into the fire.

His consolation was that Thor felt pain, too. When he was away, Thor pretended, before dinners, that he had lost a cufflink, or scuffed his shoe; he would lock the door to his room and ring Loki, and tell him something like, 'You would hate everyone here. If you were here you'd want desperately to be in Asgard. You're sulking, aren't you? —God, I wish you could see the way Lady Tjúma eats peas. It's like Poseidon trying to get at a fish with his pitchfork.'

Loki, swallowing through sudden, silent tears, would say, 'Poseidon has got a trident. The devil has a pitchfork.'

But Thor would have to ring off, and disappear into the aether. Loki would be left alone, sentenced to copy out an essay, or solve a sheet of equations. While he worked, he invented the scenes missing from his vision of Thor's life: Thor leaping a horse over a stile, Thor spilling claret onto a lady's gown, Thor out-drinking the king of Vanaheim. Thor telling Lady Tjúma about his clever, clever brother, who knew all about weapons of myth. Thor telling Lady Tjúma that his clever, clever brother was in Asgard, languishing, because he couldn't be let loose.

 

* * *

 

'You don't mind it,' he told Thor. They were sitting together under a wild apple tree, watching the sky through blots of pinkish blossoms. Branches swayed with the breeze; all of the landscape quivered, as if drunk.

'I always mind,' Thor said. 'You don't believe I stop thinking about you, when I go?'

'Oh, you're bored, yes, because you haven't got a friend you like well enough. They're too clever for you—batting it over your head about drilling for oil and the social contract—or else unclever enough, but too refined. Has anyone told you about the way you hold your knife? No, I expect they're too refined to say it. Well, you'll find someone or other you like, and you'll both feel as though you can make use of each other; and then it will all make sense to you.'

'I never thought it was only polo and luncheons. I mean I always knew the point of it, and it's made it worse. I don't like being expected to play chess and pretend it's only joking over aquavit.'

'They must hate having to coax such an imbecile into it. They must ask themselves, every night you've not caught on, _What will it take to get him into the thick of it?_ Not drink, I suppose. I remember that night in New York.'

'You know that I would give it to you,' Thor said, 'if I could.' He sounded as though his throat were tearing apart.

In late spring, the Aesir countryside was chalk pastel on grainy paper; the outlines of the sun, the sky, the paths and the horses, were blurred into each other, conveying chiefly their color. Spots of sunlight glittered through Thor, wavering with the swaying branches. Loki wanted to touch him, so pushed a strand of Thor's hair behind his ear, and stroked over the side of his head.

'You don't mean that,' he said, 'but it's all right. I doubt I would give the crown over to you, if I were you and you were the one pleading for it. ...Anyway, we've a prime minister and a parliament. Being king doesn't matter quite as much as it did.'

'Mm. I don't know if I feel better.'

Thor, slow and heavy, seeming poppy-drugged, leaned himself against Loki. Eased down by the breeze, he fell into Loki's lap; his hair spilt golden across Loki's thighs. Loki could play his hands over Thor's face, and tickle over the softest spots. He brushed his fingertips over Thor's eyelashes, so that his eyelids shuddered.

'Do you want to know how I know you don't mean it? You could give it over, when the time came. You could abdicate.'

'I couldn't live with myself,' Thor murmured.

Loki traced a fingertip over the crease of Thor's mouth; he felt the breath pull through Thor's teeth.

'I,' he said, 'can't live with myself as it is.'

He had meant it to be plaintive, pitiful; for Thor to hear the note of strain in his voice and caress him in turn. The command had been fired off into the unhearing void, where it sputtered and died. Loki felt Thor's lips twitch with his frowning; then he felt a quick, wet kiss pressed to his finger, in a careless invocation of grace.

 

* * *

 

From the latticed window in the eastern turret of the library of one of their country castles, Loki had a framed view of the sunrise. It was that library he liked best; it had Greek texts in the original, and the scent of mildew on worn, porous stone. In fits of study, he locked himself in the small turret-room and chewed through the _Nicomachean Ethics_ till he saw blue dawn between the lead of the latticework. Then he marked his line and watched what became of the night.

He looked over the tops of trees, over the fallow fields, to where the sun clambered onto the shelf of the horizon; he kept his eyes open till the view muddled, but however closely he looked, he could not see when the thinnest sliver of sun peaked over the line of the earth. There was the mauve pre-dawn, still and silent; then there was the sun, visible.

That was, in short, his madness. He had been a petulant child; but he had been as simple, then, as whether the thing in front of him could be got. Somewhere in the space between boyhood and manhood—it was the time of bone-broadening, and voice-coarsening—there was a change. The thinnest sliver of madness peaked over the line of his mind, and at once he was lit with it. He tossed barbs across the dinner table, or stole one of the cars and drove into the city, or told ugly secrets to a reporter from _Fox and Field_ magazine. Mornings he spent with his tutors; afternoons in boutiques in Valhalla, littering dressing-room floors with black wool and leopard-print; nights with the sons and daughters of Asgard's nobler families, drinking magnums of brut rosé and smoking gold-tipped cigarettes.

Of course, Thor tossed back gulps of spiced rum till his cheeks gleamed red, and broke his glasses on the floor. He liked sport in the daytime, drinking at night, and little else besides. But there was an enduring heartiness about him; to cure a hangover, he drank fresh-pressed juice and swam laps in the nearest water. He had the well-tanned skin, the lean muscle and strength, of a species of boy-nymph, who played under sun, in trees, and through streams. He could sprint through a pretty life without stumbling.

Loki could not live so brightly. He could not bolt always through libraries and lessons, interviews and factory tours, film screenings and symphonies, parties and after-parties and after-after-parties, and breakfasts after after-after-parties, and luncheons and drinks before dinners and dinners and drinks after dinners, and balls in city and hunting in country, summits on the ecosystem, summits on the economy, handshakes, salutes, calling in favors, repaying debts, smiles, greetings, goodbyes, and all of it as pointless as tossing rocks into the sea. What did it matter, if he would not rule?

So his stumbling. He could lie in bed for days on end, sustained on biscuits and mineral water, shouting away anyone who knocked at his door. He spent a month translating a selection of Martial's epigrams, and in a fit of pique, took a lighter to the bundle of translations. He dismissed his favorite tutor—the one with the wide, dark eyes, and scuffed brogues—and sent him a ten-page missive detailing all he had hated about his interpretation of the _Aeneid_. He went to parties just to split apart couples who disgusted him.

Frigga, once, let slip that Thor would accompany her on her tour of the fishing villages on the northeastern coast. Loki told her that he supposed she'd finally caught on, about Thor being the better one. When she protested he spat that she did not love him. Much later, he wept, nearly vomiting with the thought of apologizing. He was red-eyed and unwashed; his skin was run through with scratches. She found him that way, and held him, whispering, 'I love you, I love you. My darling child.'

He shook her away from him; he told her, laughingly, 'You've got the wrong one, haven't you? Thor is in the sitting room.'

Yet however he stumbled, he would stumble towards Thor, as if he were forever in the sort of dream in which one finds oneself pulled along, weak-kneed, by the strings of the sleeping mind. The morning that Thor and Frigga left for the fishing villages, Loki embraced them in farewell. He put his face in Thor's neck, and thought of biting his throat out, and gave him a chaste touch of a kiss, instead.

 

* * *

 

There was one full winter during which Thor and Loki were together, for a while unendingly together. Each morning, they tore themselves out of bed and went up to the lake, where the cold had put a table of ice over the deeper water, and wind had blown snow over the ice. Hidden, the lake seemed a long, clean plane of white, like a sloping hill, struck through only by the stretch of black water into which they would leap.

At the side of the water, they spread out towels and robes, and ritualistically stripped, folding each item and arranging them in order of dressing. For a moment they stood naked, pink-white; then they held each other's hands, and as if throwing themselves into the void, leapt into the water. It was a closing of the door to the mind, that fire, so absolutely surrounding. Thoughts went dark, and there was only the little oblivion between submersion and surface.

When they came up, of course, they were screaming and sputtering, knocking against each other in a rush to lift themselves up onto the ice. Thoughts rushed in again; Loki could feel himself perceiving the sun, the air, his bare feet in the snow. They shouted to the sky about the cold of it—'I'm turning into ice,' Thor would bellow.

Loki felt, each time he emerged, as though he had broken out of the crust of petty insolence, and stood baring his soul to that black water. Where Thor convulsed, shaking beads of water from him, rubbing his hair with his towel, Loki was still. He closed his eyes, and turned his face up; wind passed over and through him. Then, alongside Thor, he dressed.

They chased each other towards the lodge, over their own footsteps. They flicked each other with their dampened towels, and tugged each other back by the hair. Loki was old enough then to know the feeling of something escaping. He and Thor would not be those selves again.

The feeling of loving Thor, as he was then—skin paler in winter, blush in the apples of his cheeks, hair shot through with gold—for a moment drowned unhappiness. Loki choked with his love for Thor; his eyes flooded with his love for Thor.

On one of those mornings, so taken with feeling, Loki dragged Thor down into a drift of snow and held him, putting his fists against the rich, full fur of his overcoat. Thor tossed him onto his back, held him down, and put snow down the front of his shirt, crying, 'I'll punish you!' Loki covered Thor's face with a gloved hand; Thor sputtered into the wool.

When Loki drew back his hand, Thor was still: crouching above him, closely, so that the smoke-clouds of their breath blotted into each other. Thor's nose and mouth were the red of fruit; he was extraordinarily alive. He breathed through an open mouth, and swept his tongue over his lips. Above his head, knobbled branches shook down their coats of snow.

'I don't want you to ascend,' Loki said. He saw in Thor's face the slow darkening, the approach of the tolls of warning. He went on. 'I want you to stay here. I want us both to stay here, in this spot exactly, with the snow and the trees, and the owls in the trees, and the ice on the lake... And the ice down my shirt.'

They laughed together; but already love, which asked nothing, had been transmuted into greed, which asked everything. Loki wanted. He wanted—not to be there always, but for Thor to want to be there always. He wanted for Thor to kiss his feet, feed him berries in summer, pluck flowers in spring, and abdicate, and sit forever at his side, loving him.

'We would be cold.' Rolling off of Loki, dusting the snow from his furs, Thor said, 'My nose has gone numb. There's a fire waiting for us, and brandy.'

He began to walk the path; he was red and smiling, singing as he went. For a moment Loki stayed on, half-buried in snow, looking up at the lavender sky.

 

* * *

 

'Imagine,' Loki said, as they lay on their backs on the rug before the fire, their sides pressed together. He pulled a finger along the place where his hip, faintly shifting under the silk of his dressing gown, touched to Thor's. 'Imagine that we were joined, just here—so that there wasn't any space between us. We would have two legs, and two arms: I the left, and you the right.'

'We would go mad,' Thor said, laughing. 'I could never compel you to walk the way I wanted to go. You would run off with me.'

'Yes, and I suppose we would never agree on our positions, or who had got to deliver which speeches. At the coronation, there would be a bishop for each crown.'

'I don't think we would manage using knife and fork.'

'You eat with your hands anyway.'

Between them, he thought, there would be a pulsing cord of flesh, which could not be severed without killing the both of them. All of life's smallest intimacies, they would share. Not a thing about Thor would go unknown to Loki. They would share consciousness, too: Thor's thoughts would come sparkling through the cord, filling the crevices of Loki's mind. Then Loki's thoughts would snake through, wrapping their tails about Thor's. Probably Thor would find Loki's mind unforgivable.

'Would it be pompous to admire one's brother,' Thor wondered, 'if one's brother was also oneself?'

'The question,' Loki told him, 'is whether you mind about being pompous at all. Which you don't.'

'Which I don't,' Thor said.

Beneath the heat of the fire, Thor nestled closer. He put his hand at Loki's hip, as if to feel out the cord between them. It was palpable in the imagination, and throbbing invisibly—still nothing of Thor's mind came sparkling through.

 

* * *

 

Loki recalled, during still, solitary nights, the dream he had had years ago: himself and Thor on the grass by the water, bare, holding each other. The voiceless voice which told him that it was all right; he could allow himself that. With his hand at his cock, rubbing furiously, he let slip in the thought of the feeling of Thor's body, which had been more pure and precise in the dream than it had ever been in the world.

Sometimes, when he and Thor were curled together on the window-seat in Loki's bedroom in the lodge, looking over the morning paper, Loki imagined himself leaning forward and putting his mouth to Thor's. He imagined the swell of Thor's cock in his trousers. He imagined Thor cupping a hand to the swell of his own. At these thoughts there came always a sudden, physical thrill: a heat jettisoning up through his stomach, a numbness in his cheeks, the feeling of his mind blazing too brightly for his body to contain it.

It would be terribly simple: bend forward the head, tilt, align—and their mouths would come together. After that—? Well, the world was in the habit of changing. But those were only thoughts, which he used to amuse himself privately.

Thoughts, too, were the thoughts Thor must have had when lying with Loki on the sofa in the library, watching Loki read a book. Loki would see, out of the corner of his eye, that Thor looked: eyes low-lidded, but nearly unblinking. If Loki turned his head, Thor would look away.

 

* * *

 

There was a period of four days so cold that to go outside was to risk death, during which Loki did nothing but read Wilde's _Salomé_ and fuck himself with his fingers. He, spread out over sweat-damp linen—imagining Herod's peacocks, beaks spattered in gold leaf, feet dyed violet, stepping through gilt grain—curled three wet fingers into his arse and rutted down on them till he shook with exertion. To arouse himself he draped his hips in silk shantung and gold organza, and danced the dance of the seven veils.

He saw himself in Beardsley's illustrations: tall, thin, hair black and curling wildly, drawing a finger through the blood on the silver charger which held the head of John the Baptist. Yes, he and Salomé were the same—he, too, could bring a feeble ruler to his knees. He, too, could take what he most wanted. He imagined himself demanding his brother's head on a charger, and Odin pleading him to take anything in his kingdom but that.

On the morning of the third day, he woke in his bedroom in the lodge, where the snow-light fell against the panelled oak, and unwrapped his body from the bedclothes. He slicked his hands and arse in lotion, and fucked himself so roughly that his arse ached; he went till his wrists ached, too, and he came squirming, kicking his feet against the linen, imagining the Tetrarch tossing forth opals and rubies.

After he finished, he washed his hands, and nothing else. He dressed himself in cotton shorts and a faded black jumper two sizes too large; the curve of the neck showed the skin and shadows of his collarbone. Barefoot, he padded into the library—Thor was copying out an essay, there—and draped himself into an armchair by the hearth.

Within a minute Thor came by to stoke the fire.

'Thine eyes,' Loki said, as if resuming the thread of a conversation. 'Thine eyes are blue like the azurite which a monk grinds with mortar and pestle. Thine eyes are blue like the wings of the moth which the emperor places on the dead tongue of his lover. The mists that rise above the waters which fill the black paths of the glaciers are not so blue as thine eyes. Neither the ice that shields the virgin sea, nor the fingers of the corpse of the man who dares to look upon the virgin sea, are quite so blue as thine eyes.'

Thor turned his eyes to Loki. 'You sound,' he said, laughing, 'like a troubadour.'

'No—thine eyes disgust me. Thine eyes are like the blue of the scales of the ten-legged serpent who crawls beneath the gibbous moon. They are like the veins of an animal who has been plucked of its fur. There is nothing in the world so wretched as thine eyes. —It is thy skin I am enamored with. Thy skin is like the brown of the idol which has been buried by its thief in the sands of time. Thy skin is like the brown of the bark of the tree of life, the bark which weeps milk and nectar. The leather of the calf slit from throat to belly by the dagger carved from the tongue of the giantess is not so brown as thy skin.'

Thor looked, for a moment, as if he had been slit from throat to belly. He hadn't taken the poker from the heart of the fire. When he came to, and returned it to its place on the hearthstone, the tip of it steamed.

'It's from a play,' Loki said, lifting his feet onto the ottoman before him, wiggling his toes. 'For two days I've had nothing to do but read. I'm going out of my mind.'

The slit look faded from Thor. He seemed only wilfully dumb, giving a gracious laugh to a punchline he hadn't understood.

He said, 'You're always out of your mind,' meaning it, Loki knew, as the sort of joke founded on the basis of its being patently untrue.

When Thor approached the armchair, his nostrils seemed to flare minutely. Loki imagined that he smelt the scent of sex still clinging to him.

 

* * *

 

On the morning of the fourth day, when the hardiest bird could not flutter its wings in the cold, Loki stood at the window to the north of the mezzanine of the library, his hands pressed fingers-spread to the leaded glass, as though he could draw the ice into him. The sun slid into his eyes; blinking away violet, dizzy with light, he heard footsteps on the staircase leading up to the mezzanine, then footsteps nearer. Nearer yet, though he had thought he would hear them stop.

The heat of Thor's body, furnace-bright, drew across Loki's back. Thor breathed in hushes, which caught in the pocket of space between their bodies and the window.

'What is there to see?' Thor asked.

'Nothing,' Loki said, for there was only ice, and the suggestion of trees, of grass and green, somewhere far beneath it. The sun, swimming through the snow. The ice like a golden sea, so golden he thought if he leapt into it he would find it warm, caressing.

Thor put his palms to the backs of Loki's hands, slotting his fingers between Loki's fingers. Together, they touched the glass. Thor's front curved along the line of Loki's back; Thor's knees touched the backs of Loki's thighs.

'God, but the glass is cold,' Thor said.

The sun ached through Loki's skull; even through his eyelids it shone. Thor's breath stirred tendrils of his hair, and Loki thought of how it might feel to have Thor's hands parting the fall of hair from his neck, Thor kissing the line of his spine, Thor's lips pulling the small, thin hairs furrowing up his nape. Really Thor was only breathing. Really the sun was only shining, and Thor was pulling his hands away, chafing his palms against each other, mumbling disconsolately about the cold.

Thor said, 'I'm going to have a hot bath,' and then, 'I want help with lessons, after.'

'Isn't that why they've hired tutors?' Loki asked. Already the footsteps were tracking away, towards the shutting of the lower doors.

With one hand pressed still to the glass, hot as embers from the touch of Thor's palm, Loki let one hand fall to unfasten his trousers. He brought himself off, efficiently, body only half-feeling, mind colorless as ice. Thinking, that is, of nothing.

 

* * *

 

The world grew a little warmer. The snow melted into ice of the lake, revealing a flat, glassy surface, polished as a mirror, showing the trees and the skies in inversion. Sun fell through ice, and lit it from the inside, so that all of Asgard glittered.

Thor was due to Vanaheim. As his trunks were carried to the convoy, he stopped by Loki's room to bid him farewell. The sun was just coming up; if Thor was not going away, they would have been leaping into a hole in the ice of the lake, screaming at the chill of the water.

'Do say hello to King Freyr,' Loki said; he sat in a mass of pillows and eiderdowns, peering up at Thor from beneath the shadow of his canopy.

Thor, standing at Loki's bedside, reached down to take Loki's hand in his. 'I'll bring back a new scarf for you. … If there is anything else—'

Loki turned his face to the window by the side of his bed. The sliver of sun that had crested the tree-tops was bright as a bonfire, bright enough that he had to squint against its light. It hurt less than looking at Thor.

'There isn't a thing in the world,' Loki said, 'that you can do for me. I shouldn't like to think that you worry yourself about the impossible.'

'I do,' Thor said, clutching at Loki's hand, 'and I shall. … Little's impossible anyway, if one only makes an effort.'

'They'll be coming up for you any minute now. You had better go. Don't forget the scarf.'

Thor pressed a kiss to Loki's forehead, before he went. Loki watched water drip, clear and bright as diamonds, from the tips of the icicles that hung from the eave above his window.

 

* * *

 

In the dead of night—as nature's stranger things scuttled through the underbrush, and the moon hung flat and small as a silver coin—Thor returned from Vanaheim. Loki heard, from his desk in the library, the sound of cars churning through the thin snow on the walk, then the opening and shutting of doors. The night seemed outside of time. The black sky, the moonlight, the lamp-light, the fires, had all the look of impressions, as drawings done from old memory.

Loki rose from his desk, and crept through the halls, feeling that the world itself was palpable: the ticking of the clocks, the dust in the air, his feet on the hardwood, the moonlight. He felt his heart in his chest, his teeth and tongue, his blinking eyes. He pressed open the door to Thor's bedroom.

A puddle of lamplight wavered yellow in the darkness; by that light Thor was drawing back the bedclothes, and humming to himself. At the sound of the door he looked up, smiling. Loki shut the door behind him.

'I wanted to see you,' Loki said. 'I couldn't wait till the morning.'

'I hadn't wanted to wake you, coming in.' Thor, in long, white nightshirt, clambered into the bedclothes; he patted the space next to him, where the eiderdown was drawn back. 'But you're here, now, and I'm glad for it. Sit.'

'I would rather lie, thank you.' Loki was climbing, already, onto the mattress; in the expanse of white, he stretched luxuriously, and rolled near to where Thor sat tucked beneath the eiderdown. He pulled the eiderdown to his shoulders, put his head against Thor's chest, and said, 'Hello, dear brother.'

'King Freyr gives his regards. Your scarf has been put up in your bedroom.'

'Oh yes. There is something I love you for. —If we're telling news, Dr. Brauer says that you're to rewrite your essay on Caesar. He says that he can tell you've only watched that film.'

'In the morning,' Thor said. 'I will do everything I'm meant to do, in the morning.'

'Yes, this isn't the time for duty. You look as if you haven't slept in days. How many frightful dinners you must have sat through. Well—sleep, now.'

Thor's eyes were low-lidded, fluttering with half-sleep, irises still as the dead. 'You haven't got to go,' he said, between long, low breaths, which had Loki's head rising and falling on his chest.

'I know that,' Loki said. 'I'll stay.'

Thor slept. Loki dozed; his mind wandered through dizzy incomprehensibles, which vanished when clutched at. Through it all he was aware of Thor's body: the throbbing heart, the rising chest, the parting lips, all warm with minute motion. While Thor slept he turned himself towards Loki, grasping instinctually for the comfort of another body.

They were facing each other, and holding each other, when Thor began to wake. Loki felt Thor's breath go shallow, and his twitching toes draw up from the chill at the foot of the bed. Thor was whole. That was what Loki thought of him: his body was noble, and held his soul well.

Coarse brown hair curled across the slip of chest that showed in the deep neck of his nightshirt. The lamplight shaded in the shadows of his cheekbones, and the broad line of his nose. His cock had swelled up, stretching the long front of his shirt. Loki felt the weight of it against his hip; a flare passed from his stomach to his face, lighting him, waking him, and he thought for a moment of hooking his leg over Thor's waist and rocking against him till he spent in his shorts. It was the sort of fantasy which sprung directly from the body, from the body's ravening.

There was a part of Loki, no small part, that knew how simple it would be to do it. The molding of the mind was complex as watch-making; but the body—

When Thor woke fully, his breath hitched, and Loki knew that he knew. He began to pull himself up. 'I'm sorry,' he muttered; but Loki had clasped his fingers round his wrist, and drew him gently back.

'No.' It was the sort of soft _no_ that told Thor, above all else, that he hadn't to be ashamed of himself. Humility was not Thor's natural state; it did not suit him. 'It's barely dawn. Lie down.'

So Thor lay down, and Loki lay against him. Together, beneath the warmth of the eiderdown, they breathed. Thor was awake—likely feeling every nerve in his body, every bending hair, every brush of linen at skin, every brush of skin at skin. Likely biting his lip to keep from screaming at how badly he wanted to be touched.

Loki felt the tenderest rocking of Thor's hips; it must have been uncontrollable. The quietest shaking of Thor's hands. A heat pulled through Loki, beginning at his toes, rolling up through his skin. His face had gone pink. His cock ached. Beyond the little ecstasies of arousal, he was serene, for it had come to this. There was fate to be given over to.

'I want to touch you,' Loki whispered. His lips were against Thor's throat, so that he felt it when Thor swallowed. 'It would please you to be touched; I want to please you.'

Nestling his head beneath Thor's chin, Loki lifted the hem of Thor's nightshirt, and wrapped his hand round his cock. Thor seemed not to breathe. Pressing himself to Thor's chest, Loki curled his fingers loosely at Thor's cock; he drew back the foreskin, and tickled his fingertips over the soft skin beneath. He rubbed his thumb at the head, and felt a drop of fluid; Thor groaned, and clutched his hand at the shoulder of Loki's jumper, twisting the fabric. Loki felt the outline of Thor's fingers at his skin.

He began to quicken, hoping that Thor would wriggle and gasp for him; but Thor was pulling away, and sitting up. His cock stood flushed and plump, curving up from beneath the hem of his nightshirt. Flushed, too, were his cheeks; flushed were his lips, from biting.

'Loki,' he said, 'what in God's name?'

'It's the flesh.' Loki laughed, and rolled onto his back. 'I've given in to the temptations of the world and the devil; I thought I would finish out the trio. … Oh, Thor, for heaven's sake, don't look at me that way. I'm having a laugh.'

'You aren't.' It seemed a sort of strained, desperate stabbing at hope. Thor did not like to believe that Loki could want such an ugly thing as the flesh. Only Thor, over-passionate, outwards-spilling, could be burdened with an excess of desire—sometimes he felt compelled to gulp down rum even after he was wild with drunkenness, and he was like that now, inescapably.

Loki took Thor's hand in his, and kneaded it with his fingers. He traced along the lines of his palm, soothing him, softening the sharp divot in his brow. He kissed all five of Thor's fingertips. Then he drew two of Thor's fingers into his mouth, and licked the flat of his tongue along their undersides. He watched Thor's jaw go slack, and felt something monstrous pull his heart down to his stomach.

'Bodies,' he said, holding Thor's fingers near to his mouth, breathing against the wetness. 'Bodies—I don't suppose anyone knows for certain about bodies. Surely we can't go very far arguing against the mind, but the body... So far as bodies are dumb organisms, I would like to think they can be said to be exist. Still, they aren't so immediate as minds. … Did you feel pleasure, when I had your prick in my hand? I want to know.'

Thor took in a breath as if he meant to shout, full-lunged; then he was still, slowed with the force of emotion. He broke out of the stillness to say, 'I don't know.'

Loki held the tip of Thor's finger between his lips, pulling at it in small, gentle suckles. He felt Thor tremble; that was the crumbling of the columns of the temple of virtue.

'I felt pleasure,' he said. 'In the mind as much as in the body. I felt it because I supposed you did, too. I was pleased to feel I was pleasing you.'

'You're lying.' Thor went red with insult; he drew back his hand so sharply that the force of it shot pain through Loki's wrist. 'You're making a fool of me. You want me to— You want me to say that— You want me to demean myself, that you might laugh at me for—'

'For wanting to get your pleasure out of me?'

He had hit his mark; he saw it in the ruin of Thor's face.

'I would never hurt you,' Thor said. He meant it so, so truly that Loki laughed.

Loki spread his legs. He was displayed for Thor against the linen: bare legs slim and long, black shorts riding up to the join of his legs and his body, jumper pulled up to reveal a slip of white stomach, rising and falling with breath.

Palming his cock through his shorts, he said, 'Don't hurt me, then. I'll do it to myself.'

He pulled his jumper over his head. Beneath it he'd worn nothing; his chest, moon-white, rose with gooseflesh at Thor's looking. His shorts and pants were next to be shed, after which he was laid bare upon the altar. His cock stood stiff in a bed of black curls; he reached down a hand to pull lazily.

'You know,' he told Thor, 'that you couldn't hurt me. Even if you tried.'

'But I want'—Thor was leaning over him, pressing a palm into the stretch of linen at Loki's side, lowering himself so that the ends of his hair tickled against Loki's cheek, and his hip settled solidly against Loki's hip—'I want to do much more than not hurt you. I want to have you happy.'

Thor had cast the die, though he did not see that he had done. That he had leaned over Loki, that he breathed against the skin of Loki's face, that he lifted a hand to stroke along Loki's cheek—well, that was giving pleasure, and taking it, thoroughly and truly.

Still he barred himself; he let his fingers waver over the skin of Loki's cheek, touching so softly he must have thought that to brush Loki's skin would be to rip it open. Loki held Thor's gaze till violet ribboned through his vision, streaming through white pinpricks, worming over the hazy brown of Thor's face.

Loki said, 'You are having me happy. Now.'

He closed his eyes, that Thor might look without shame. He reached between his legs, and slid his fingers into the crevice of his arse; he stroked his fingertips over his hole, and felt for the wash of subtle pleasure. No quick, breathless filling, fucking, aching; he would go slowly.

'Am I?' Thor asked.

Loki said, 'You are.'

He pressed at the head of his cock, and in the outer-space quiet of the room, heard the creaking of the mattress as Thor rolled onto his back; then the slick sound of flesh, for Thor was rubbing himself off.

The breath clutched in Thor's throat, released, clutched and released. The slap of his cock fucking into the grip of his fist grew louder; the bed-springs hiccuped beneath the force of his body rocking into his thrusts. Beneath his breath, he whispered, _Ah, ah, ah, ah._ Then, _Loki,_ but once, and quietly, and pitched up as if a question.

Loki felt, teasing his fingers at his hole, that some devil entered his body through his open mouth. He was taken by an inner heat, which pressed out from his center and hit up against the walls of his body, tearing at the boundaries of his self. Against that heat it was all he could do not to rip his skin off and be done with desire.

He had never felt more like a living thing, set firmly in its time. The stars spun about the outer dark; his mind spun about the outer dark; his body was there, violently wanting, touching itself, listening to its brother touch himself. His body wanted to be fed with filth. Thor's body, too; and Thor was coming, choking on his own gasps, crying out. Loki did not open his eyes.

Thor was still for a long while. Loki drew his fingers over his shaft, over his hole, revelling in his own feeling. Then the mattress bent with Thor's drawing closer.

Leaning over him—Loki could see the shadow through his eyelids—Thor said, 'Do you want to finish? Will you let me—?'

'I love you,' Loki said. It was uncontrollable, like the jerk of a dead limb when shocked. He let his hands fall from his body. 'You can touch me.'

Soon it was all over: his back was arching up from the mattress, his toes curling in on themselves, his thighs trembling with the effort of rutting up. Thor's hand was warm, damp with sweat, thick around his cock; he lingered, even after his fingers had been spattered in come. He felt out the shape of Loki's softening cock, his balls, his stomach, as if savoring something that he would not ever have again. At Loki's final letting-out of breath, he drew away.

…

Well, the door had been opened. Nothing else but death, Loki thought, had such enduring finality. Only these things, out of the myriad comings and goings, buttonings and unbuttonings, of human life, could so indelibly alter the world.

The world, of course, returned. The dawn had broken; blue light fell across the bedclothes. The room was quiet but for the drip of snow melting from the roof, and a faraway crying of birds.

Thor looked—Loki saw his face, floating over him, when he opened his eyes—as though he was bursting over. With what, Loki couldn't say. Love, shame, fear, desire; all of those usual contortions of nature. He cupped his hand at Loki's cheek, and rubbed his thumb over his cheekbone, feeling the flush of his cheeks.

'Brother,' Thor said. 'Are you—?'

Though he had spent, Thor was trapped, still, in uncomprehending doing. It would be such a long time before he knew what he had done.

Loki put his face up; he lowered his eyelids. He felt Thor's breath across his face, and then his mouth, and said, 'Do you want to kiss me, too?'

Thor kissed him, tenderly, with a mouth like a fabric so supple that the fingers could not help but run over it. Loki wanted to press his own mouth to Thor's, again and again, feeling out precisely the pull of its flesh between teeth, the slickness of it when wet with the tongue. He would have done, in another time, or another world—somewhere sweet with nothingness, where he and Thor could unspool centuries together. That was not this world. He kissed Thor once. He thought, _I have kissed thy mouth_ , and stood, and went away.

 

* * *

 

In the cool, still white of the bath, bright by morning sun through crown-glass windows, Loki stood before the basin, shuddering with the whole of his body, feeling his insides bulging, squeezing, pulsing up vomit through convulsions of his throat. His brow dripped sweat; he had gone so bloodless that his skin was cold. No sooner did he think of the sun against the tile, or the scent of the soaps on the table, than he was flooded by _Thor, Thor, Thor, Thor_.

He had sailed, like Ulysses, past the stones which marked the edge of the earth. The prow of his boat had pitched into the sea; the sea had drawn over him, like a sheet of linen drawn over a sleeper. He had gone so far beyond his own life that he had lost it, and so would die, and so waited to die.

After all, no: he lived. He washed his mouth, dried his hands, and sailed on.

 

* * *

 

Still he had the suspicion, for days after, that everything on earth had flown away from its center, and that what looked like his usual bed, his usual book, his usual desk, or his usual body, were shams constructed to hide what had fallen apart. He found himself staring at the grain of the hardwood, or at the reflection in his cup of coffee, as though he could see through them and into reality.

Thor seemed to want to sweat his sin from his body. He ran eight kilometers a day, sat in sauna each morning and night, and chopped piles of wood for the fire. If he was too still, he had thoughts; so he fiddled with his napkin at the dinner table, and did his lessons in sprints of five minutes.

They danced around each other, as if to brush against each other in the corridor, or to look into each other's eyes, would be to send them both bursting into flames. The lodge became a stage for their ballet of avoidance; they turned from each other, and turned, and turned. They glided off into the wings.

 

* * *

 

Frigga's sitting rooms had always been sanctuaries, of a sort. She kept potpourri—orange peels, cinnamon sticks, pine, cloves—in hand bowls on her vanities, next to sable brushes and incense holders. In the northern lodge she kept a small fountain on a pedestal beneath the picture window, so that light would glisten through the falling water. Loki recalled being very small, curled in Frigga's lap, watching the snow fall beyond the fountain.

He sat next to her on the sofa, now, with limbs long enough that he seemed to cut into the air. She took his hands in hers, and looked him over as though his body was telling her something. He wanted to curl into himself, to stop her from seeing; he sat still.

'To fight with your brother,' she told him, 'hurts the both of you more than you know. It is not, I suspect, as simple as willing yourselves to make up; but if something can be done, I urge you to do it.'

'Would you stop loving me,' he said, 'if I had done something—terrible?'

She took his chin in her hand, and tilted his face up, so that she could look him in the eye. Tears sprung up, and wet his lashes; he looked over her shoulder, into the water of the fountain, where it fed into itself. Mists had fogged the window.

'Love,' she said, 'once established, is hardly so easily revoked. My love towards you might alter, dear, in nature. But love always alters, according to the day or hour; that is living.'

What began as a catch in his throat, he raised into a sob. He leaned forwards, and, heaving with weeping, pressed his face to her shoulder. She hushed him; she told him to listen to the sound of the fountain, and imagine rivers and streams.

When Loki lifted from her shoulder, he saw a flit of movement in the crack of her half-open door. Thor, who had been looking in, had turned away.

 

* * *

 

From the yard of the woodshed, where patches of grass peeked up from worn snow, rang out a regular drumbeat of snaps, loud as fireworks. Otherwise, there was stillness and quiet; no wind whistled. Thor stood in his vest and trousers, slicked with sweat, cleaving firewood with an axe.

Odin had taught him to do it, years ago, when he was barely big enough to hold the axe. It was the sort of thing that a fellow learnt, Odin said. One couldn't rely on other people to reckon with nature in one's stead. He had told Loki that he would teach him, too, when he had grown up, and could reckon with things; but it had been years since then.

Loki, approaching slowly, had a flash of Thor's axe cleaving into his skull. He nearly leapt at the smack of the axe lodging into the block; but Thor was wiping his brow with a dirtied cloth, and putting his hands at his hips. It occurred to Loki that either of them could kill each other, easily.

'Hello, Thor,' he said.

'Were you telling the truth?' Thor asked.

'Pardon?'

'Do you feel you've done a terrible thing?'

Loki came near to Thor; he took Thor's dirt-streaked wrists in his hands, and unfolded his arms. Thor put up no refusal.

'Did you hear what Mother said, when you were listening in?'

'I didn't—' Thor attempted, weakly, to tug away from Loki, who kept his wrists in his hands. 'I didn't mean to listen in. The door was open; I heard—'

'She said'—Loki put his hands in Thor's, and braided their fingers together—'love alters, by the hour or the day. Do you wonder how often our love has altered? We have had as many loves—as a wood has leaves of grass. Now there is another leaf of grass. That is what she meant; that is living.'

'You mean that it wasn't terrible.'

'I thought it was. Do you know I meant to run away? There is a trunk half-packed on the floor of my bedroom. I had gone to say goodbye to Mother, perhaps, I thought, for the last time.'

'It matters so little,' Thor said. He was clenching Loki's hands in his palms; he was holding him fast, as if anchoring. 'None of it matters. None of it matters truly. … Papa said once that you were the sort who cut off his nose to spite his face. I said I thought you were cleverer than that. But if you do go away—'

'You don't see that I've stopped to think it matters? I hadn't understood. I was wrong.'

Thor began to laugh, loudly and not without pathos. He had gathered the will to break away from Loki, so worked loose his hands. 'I would have laid down my life,' he said, 'on a bet that you would never, on pain of death, say that you were wrong.'

'I've said it now, haven't I?' In the cold, still air, Loki's cheeks blazed; he curled his hands into fists, and stood before Thor, glowering up at him, burning into himself. 'I am cleverer than that. I haven't got to cut off my nose to spite my face; first of all it isn't my face I'd spite, and second of all there are other ways to spite things. If you had listened for longer you would have heard that I didn't say goodbye to her. … Do you mind, now that you know I won't go? Do you wish I had gone?'

'For heaven's sake,' Thor cried. He clutched his hands to Loki's shoulders, and shook; he leaned in so closely that his breath burst across Loki's face. 'Directly you've got what you've wanted, you toss it all aside, like so much— Like so much—'

'When have I ever got what I wanted?' Loki was nearly screaming, now; his throat had pulled taut, and gone raw. 'I wanted Father to teach me how to shoot; he took you to the hunting lodge. I spent days in the stables; Father gave you a Thoroughbred. When I asked to study under a metaphysician, he asked me, what did it matter, I'd books, hadn't I? When have I ever, ever got a thing I have wanted, in all my life?'

Snow had begun to fall, so thinly and densely that it seemed to fade the trees, the clouds, the wood and the axe. Loki could feel it settling against his upturned face, and melting. Thor stood insensate; he looked as though all that Loki had said had filtered through him and left him whole, unharmed. The stone hadn't yet dropped to the bottom of the well.

When it had, Thor took Loki by the shoulders and thrust him into the shed, where the scent of snow gave way to the richness of moss and dry wood. Loki, as his back hit the wall, found that he smelt Thor, too: sweat and musk, dirtied cotton, snow-damp hair. He closed his eyes and inhaled.

'There are things I want,' Thor said, 'that I've not got.'

'So take them.'

Thor's hands fumbled at the buttons of Loki's overcoat, tearing the wool from his shoulders; his hands lifted Loki's jumper and vest, so that the stretch of white, taut skin between the bones of his hips came up to the air. Loki took in a sharp breath; Thor went still.

'Are you frightened?' Loki asked. 'Of what you want? Or of the thought that you might take it, regardless of whether it is what I want?'

With his fist still twisting the hem of Loki's jumper, he pressed his forehead to Loki's; his breath, hard and unsteady, battered across Loki's mouth. 'I'm frightened,' he said, 'that I might know better than you.'

'But you never do. You never, never do. Don't you see, Thor, that you haven't got to worry yourself about these things. Because I do know better than you, and can worry about things on your behalf. … I might stop to want it, this thing that we both want, once we have got it. But will that stop you from reaching for it, now, as I offer it up? What's this touching, if you know better?'

Into Loki's ear, so hoarsely that Loki shuddered at the sound of it, Thor said, 'Tell me what you want, and I will give you it. I will give you what you want, brother, always.'

A smile quivered at the corners of Loki's lips; he tried to stop it, and found that he laughed. Thor really wanted to know. Loki opened his eyes—the white of the snow outside of the woodshed was so unbearably bright that he squinted. Wind slipped across the front of the shed; inside, the pull of Thor's breath seemed a roar.

'You know.'

'Tell me.'

Loki had come to the crest of desire. His hands shook with it; his breath caught in it; his body burnt with it. It was as if he had leapt into icy water—he felt only sensation, sheer and absolute, forcing him into motion. He wanted to be gratified, and damn the rest of it. So he bared his neck; he spread his legs. He took Thor's hand and brought it to where his cock stood hard beneath his trousers.

He said, 'Bring me off,' and then nothing else.

Thor hooked his thick fingers beneath the band of Loki's trousers, and tore them down to his thighs. His cock sprang loose, jutting stiffly into cold air; Thor closed a fist round his shaft, and pulled.

'This?' Thor breathed. 'Why this?'

It was like having his mind torn loose from his skull. Loki had never felt pleasure so unbearable—he felt as if he could scream with it, with that utter, enveloping need, and found instead that he choked up the tatters of a gasp, torn-through and raw. None of the frigging, the frotting, the thigh-fucking, the finger-fucking, that he had ever done with any stupid, stiff-pricked boy, was so hellish a pleasure as Thor's tugging at his cock.

'Because,' he said, 'it makes me happy.'

He threw his head back against the slats of the shed-wall; he felt pain ricochet through his skull, and pleasure through his cock, and he thrust up his hips. He lifted onto his toes. He clutched at Thor's waist, or at his hair; Thor groaned, and pressed wet kisses to the side of his face.

As the last, furious pulse of feeling seared up from the root of his gut and held, scintillating, white-hot, at the head of his cock—in the final space before spending, before the real fullness of life settled in again—Loki whispered, 'The old world is dead, brother. Long live the world.'

He closed his eyes, and came gasping. Beyond the woodshed, snow fell; wind passed through the trees.

 

* * *

 

'I understand,' Thor said. They lay together in the blue afternoon light, hands laced together, listening to the wind rattle the windows of Thor's bedroom. 'About love. I feel I understand what it is you meant about love. It didn't come together, at first.'

'My clever brother.'

'Are you laughing at me? I meant what I said; I do understand. About the—wood, and the grass. You mean to say, it is different, but also the same.'

'Yes, but I meant what I said, too. … Heavens, the wind this winter.'

'You had better keep warm,' Thor said; and he held Loki to his chest, where he most exuded warmth, as if he had got to bar Loki from the elements. Loki felt hot, mostly, when clutched so close to a large, living body; but then they were gently kissing, because Loki knew that he might. After all of those private thoughts, there were Thor's lips to be kissed, and yielding, too. He wanted to have it again—oh, there the kiss, soft, warm. Oh yes, there it was again, and there again.

 

* * *

 

Soon after the woodshed, the family returned to the palace in Valhalla. The spring 'season' began. Thor was thrust, faintly befuddled, into another spin of banquets, cocktail parties, ceremonies. Loki followed behind him, and feigned uncaring. The snow in Valhalla, dirty with footprints and exhaust, began to melt; rain began to fall, leaving the air misty and humid, the soil ripe for growing.

Thor and Loki lived under the bell jar of their secret. They were seen, but not understood. Their father supposed that their independence had asserted itself, and if their mother suspected that he was wrong, she said nothing. Thor talked with Odin over cigars and liqueurs; Frigga brushed Loki's hair, which was then at mid-back, and told him her stories of old Asgard. But there was a sheet of glass between parent and child, which could not be reached through. It could be broken, perhaps, with the telling of the secret—which wouldn't do, yet. So the brothers went on, against the world.

One morning, before a luncheon with the Chief of War, Loki crawled into bed and sucked Thor off. Odin's assistant rapped at their locked door, telling them that they were due at the luncheon in a half hour; Loki tongued at the head of Thor's cock, breathing hotly against the slick of spit, rubbing his fingertips at the underside of Thor's balls. 'Half an hour,' Thor groaned; so Loki made him come in two minutes, and swallowed.

Late on a Saturday evening, Loki sat at the escritoire in their bedroom, volumes of Plato spread out before him, feverishly copying out the Stephanus numbers he would need for citations. Thor tried, and failed, to convince him to put his books away; so he lifted Loki out of his chair and threw him, squirming and shrieking, onto his bed. Loki chided Thor for his eagerness, but let him strip him naked. Thor turned Loki onto his front, put a pillow beneath his stomach, and fucked his thighs till Loki was fairly weeping, rutting hopelessly against the pillow. As soon as he demanded, Thor turned him onto his back, again, and jerked him to finish.

During some brutal, endless performance of Wagner, they teased each other with touches to the thigh, faint brushes against the crotch—'Here, look at the program,' or 'You've got a bit of fluff on your trousers, just there'—and then crept out of their box and into the water closet, where they rubbed each other off. Loki, fucking impatiently into Thor's hand, said, 'God, I bloody loathe Wagner'; and Thor, nuzzling beneath Loki's ear, said, 'I think he's majestic.' Loki spent against Thor's waistcoat; Thor had to blot the stain with soap and water.

It was the usual flush and unfurling of manhood. They cared little for anything but that which their bodies could give them; they chased finish as if it were gold, some momentously precious substance which had to be accrued and then hoarded. All throughout Asgard, such flowers were blooming—such near-men and near-women were petting, groping, kissing, gossiping, fighting. Scores of their cousins, with whom they had walked through the parks, were hurling themselves headlong into love.

Thor and Loki felt a part of it, and kept away from it, both at once. Oh, yes—they, too, knew the pain of a petty spat, or the thrill of shirking one's lessons to run off to fuck. But to the people they knew, they seemed curiously, almost suspiciously chaste. Loki was assumed to be 'that way', which couldn't be helped—what, then, of Thor?

There were rumors that he had fallen in love with a commoner, some plain girl from the outskirts of Valhalla, who attended a state-run school and worked at her father's shop. There were rumors that he had fallen in love with a princess of Muspelheim, who had convinced him to siphon money from the state in order to fund her luxurious wardrobe. Loki laughed at all of it, for there was a sort of boil of guilt in Thor, which could be prodded at and picked apart.

'Don't you have a girl?' Loki asked, once, while unfastening Thor's trousers, rubbing his fingers through the curls of brown hair beneath his navel. 'Some beautiful thing you will marry, someday?'

'You would know if I did,' Thor said.

Spring grew hotter, brighter, greener. The apple trees blossomed. Thor and Loki went on. Their outer life—the hand-shaking, the deal-making, the award-giving—fell away, seeming then only a little game with which they could amuse themselves when bored of fucking. Thor learned to smile dazzlingly, to hide that he could do hardly anything else. He had, also, a strong handshake, which seemed indicative, if not demonstrative, of a strength of soul. It was said that he would be a good king—for he had Asgard in his heart. That counted for something, Loki supposed.

 

* * *

 

It was unseasonably wet, the day Odin called Loki up to his study. In the courtyard of the palace, gravel bubbled with pooled rain; mist blurred the towers and turrets. The room, which in spring should have been glowing with sunlight, was shadowed. Loki sat sprawled in an armchair before Odin's desk, jogging his foot and picking at his fingernails, tapping his hand at his thigh.

'Your tutors,' Odin said, peering at a sheaf of papers through his monocle, 'feel that it would be to your advantage to move forwards. You shall sit your exams next month. You shall choose a course at Oxford, and apply...'

Beyond the hum of Odin's voice, the rain thickened. Loki stared into the light refracted in the glass-globe paperweight on Odin's desk. His tapping slowed, then stopped entirely, for it had occurred to him.

'Oh, I see it now.' He looked up. He felt poised, suddenly graceful, benevolent; beneath that benevolence, a coldness of the heart and the throat, a stoppage. He smiled. 'You're sending me away.'

Odin leaned forward. 'You and your brother' —he put his hands on his desk— 'are well past the age at which you might have begun making lives for yourselves. Neither of you, I believe, have quite understood your positions.'

'Do you mean to estrange us?'

'I mean to allow you to grow. Your duties are different to Thor's; it would put you at a disadvantage, would it not, to live always in his shadow, as a follower?'

Likely Odin had meant it as an incendiary, tossed deliberately down. He must have relished the thought of Loki sparking into flame, raging, overturning the things on his desk, screaming about how he followed no one. Loki knew better.

He sat back in his chair, and crossed his legs. His heart beat so strongly that it must have been visible, and his mouth had gone dry; but he gathered his costume about him.

'I don't live in Thor's shadow,' he told Odin. 'He lives in mine. I suspect that you understand that, or else you wouldn't want to be rid of me.'

'He is not in your shadow. He is under your influence. It is a different thing altogether. A person is not a ball of string which you might play with—'

'Isn't one?'

'The world is not a stage, Loki. Men and women are not players, but selves in their own right, who must be treated as such.'

'Why doesn't it matter to you, that Thor shall never do as he likes? That Thor ought to be a self in his own right, who must be treated as such—and isn't? Thor never had a self. His self consists in his being your son. You don't mind about that; you mind about prodding him into his place. It pains you, not being able to control us.'

Loki stood; he went slowly, smoothing himself, bringing himself to full height. He adjusted his tie. He looked down at Odin, who did not rise, but seemed to sneer, having known so much of Loki that another little pop of a poison dart did nothing to him. Loki wanted to tear away the curtain, and show Odin that he knew him.

'For so long,' he went on, 'I had wished you would have loved me. I saw that you did not love me, and wondered which part of me was rotten, which part of me infected the whole of me, and made me unlovable. Now that I see what your sort of love does, I feel thankful I was never in your favor. I alone have become myself. Would that I could discard the name of Odinson.'

'No,' Odin said—oh, he took pleasure in it. 'I don't believe that you would discard the name, had you the chance.'

'Isn't it telling that you haven't denied it? That you have never loved me?'

Odin smiled, slyly, eye deadened; he must have thought that he had caught Loki in a trick.

'I do love you,' he said. 'You are my son, and I love you. … You don't feel better, do you, for hearing it? You have eaten this love I have given you, and hunger for something greater. Thor does fill himself with love, and perhaps he is made weak, in ways, by his tendency; but where he is weak in some ways, you are weak in others. Your eye is occluded with the speck of self. You mind that I have not fed your hunger; you mind that I have not given you the power you feel you deserve.'

The smile had gone, and Odin was only somber. He seemed, for the first time, aged. The rain deepened his wrinkles, and clouded his eye. His hands were thick and pale, mottled with brown spots; his fingers shook as he folded them in his lap.

'Loki,' he said, 'you have earned nothing for yourself. You have not earned your place in the world, you have not earned respect, you have not earned your manhood, you have not, God knows, earned the right to the crown. You have earned nothing, and you shall have nothing which you do not earn.'

Beyond the heat in his cheeks, the tautness of his shoulders, the pain of his nails pressing into the meat of his palm, Loki felt his heart. Grasped by some invisible fingers, it seemed to leap and bleed, filling his chest, pulsing up to his throat. The world about him was unreal—brightness throbbed at the corners of his vision—he could not bear to look at the paperweight, the rain at the window, his father.

He thought of the color of Thor's skin against linen, and looked at Odin as if stabbing the sight into his eyes. Odin saw nothing. The universe itself was inside of Loki—he knew. He, alone, could meet it eye to eye.

 

* * *

 

'He's mad,' Thor said, upon hearing. He was walking with Loki in the private gardens, where they had once uprooted orchids. The greenery was flushed with spring, sweating with the dew of spring; dim mists wet the leaves. As they passed along the mossy brick, Thor kicked at stones. 'Because it pleases _him_ is no reason to go from your homeland—'

'I am going away,' Loki said, reaching out to pluck and discard a moist blossom. 'I don't give a damn about Asgard.'

Thor turned to Loki; he put a hand at his shoulder, and let it wander upwards, to curl a lock of thick, dark hair behind his ear. Loki fixed his gaze at the top button of Thor's shirt, where a thread had come loose. Thor's chest rose and fell with the effort of hard breathing.

'I'll speak to him,' Thor said, 'and tell him that he can't possibly force you to go. Tell me what you would rather do, and I will fight to the last, that you might be allowed to do it.'

Looking up, Loki said, 'I'm going to university in the U.S. I've been banished from Asgard, I suppose, and I would rather bash my skull in with a brick than follow in Father's footsteps to Oxford. So—America.'

Thor's hand dropped to his side. He seemed as though his heart was being pulled out of his chest; his eyes had the sort of stillness of someone whose soul was slipping from him. He gave a plaintive moan of, 'America?'

Loki put his hands to Thor's cheeks and said, 'I won't tolerate sulking. You will not sulk, or else I will leave you till you are jolly again. Yes? Good. Smile. Rejoice. It will be much better for me. I plan to let myself air out.'

'You'll be six thousand kilometers away. A kiss can't be given across six thousand—'

'Father, I'm sure, would recommend you find someone else to kiss.'

'I don't give any more of a damn about his word than you do. Brother, I would love before I obeyed.'

Thor wrenched Loki's hands from his face. Immediately, his sorriness showed; he clutched Loki to his broad, hard chest, and held him. Loki let his head loll against Thor, where he smelt of wet air and soil, the human-musk trapped in the dense curls of hair, the cologne he had daubed at his neck after his bath. Loki closed his eyes.

'I do love you, Thor,' he said. 'Know this.'

Mist fell. Their hair curled with damp, their skin was damp. The leaves of the greenery rustled in a slow, cool breeze. For a moment Loki's hatred was dwarfed by this feeling, for which he did not have a name—pleasure, if anything, but gentle. It was not the wanting pleasure. He felt forgiven by this, this feeling of leaning against Thor, putting his arms around Thor, smelling Thor.

Yet he did not feel forgiven enough to want to stay. He would go abroad to another life, for a while. He would put away childish things; he would sharpen himself at the whetstone. When he was sharp, clean and pure—when he could tear into the belly of life and rip what he liked from it—he would come to Valhalla, again. Damn the prodigal; he would be the son who sat at the feast having earned it.

 

* * *

 

Summer, autumn. Rain wetting the thick coats of brown leaves which clotted the cobblestones of Valhalla. Loki sat his exams, and applied to university. He felt little impatience in waiting; he had the pick, his tutors told him, of all the universities in the world—or, as it were, America. By winter he had chosen St. Ives College, where the clever and privileged travelled from the ends of the earth to meet each other. It was a charming little village of red brick Georgian houses, spread about the meadows of upstate New York; Loki liked it because it was a half hour by train from the city.

Choosing a destination made his going-away utterly final; he had put his pin on the map. Odin could rest knowing that Thor would soon be his own to mold. Frigga drew closer to Loki. They ate dinner alone, occasionally, and she told him about her years at university, where she struggled to be allowed to study as seriously as a man might have done. By then the world knew that she would marry Odin, someday, when they were older; to study at all had seemed a slap to her duty.

'The duty,' she said, 'that fate has chosen for you, mustn't crush the duty that you choose for yourself. The greatest people have not been the ones who do what is expected of them, but the ones who fulfill their own ambitions.'

Loki detected, sometimes, a tear in her eye, which she patted away with the back of her hand, pretending that she brushed away a fallen lash. He allowed her to embrace him, and wondered that the poison in him, bubbling acidly, did not eat into her. She was his mother, and Thor's mother; how did she not see that pulsing cord which bound her sons? She knew that Loki looked away, sometimes, when she spoke of Thor. She held Loki regardless.

 

* * *

 

Towards the end of winter, Odin announced that Thor would be attending the military academy in Idavoll, in the far north of Asgard. It was the sort of place where rows and rows of indistinguishable young men slept in barracks, and ran ten kilometers a day, and shot rifles at grain sacks. It would have broken Loki, but it was just the thing for Thor, who had a fluttering excitement about it.

'When I am an officer,' he told Loki, 'I shall ask to be posted somewhere with mountains, and birds, and buckets of rain.'

Being with Thor took on the slow, sad sweetness of a thing that would soon be gone. A part of them was set back from their bodies, looking down on themselves; it was as if they had parted already, and remembered. Still they filled themselves with stores of pleasure. They shoved each other's trousers down their thighs and thrust up against each other, finishing within minutes. One would approach the other, and without speaking, unfasten his trousers and bring him apart with his hands or his mouth—then glide away, having wanted nothing but to avail himself of touch.

Often, in the spring and summer leading up to their parting, they feigned illness and took whole afternoons to roll about in one of their beds, slowly sucking each other off. They savored that it was so simple, then, to touch the skin of the other's stomach, or kiss the insides of his thighs, or tickle the arch of his foot, or trace the line of his back. Their outer selves crumpled and tore, and revealed little animals, only living.

When Thor called Loki his brother, it was a salute to the connection between them that was cosmic and eternal. Thor believed, he said, that their souls, which did not have mothers or fathers, were the parts of them that touched.

 

* * *

 

'Did you know,' Loki said, one chilly spring morning, lying in bed next to Thor, watching shadows move vaguely across the ceiling, 'that there was a philosopher who believed that all that exists is a single thing? That change simply isn't?'

'He was pretty quickly proved wrong, wasn't he?' Thor reached out a hand to stroke across Loki's chest, as if to say, here is a change.

'Listen to me.' Loki shifted onto his side, facing Thor. With his hair spilling over bare shoulders, and Thor's legs twined with his, he said, 'Necessarily, what _is_ and what _can be thought of_ are one and the same. Whatever exists in the great, dark universe might be conceived of. But if _being_ and _being able to be thought of_ are the same, it is impossible to think of non-being. Yet creation cannot exist without non-being; if a thing comes into being, there must be a non-being which preceded it. And change relies upon creation—change is creation. If no non-being, no creation; if no creation, no change. So—nothing has come into being, or has stopped to be. And certainly nothing has changed. We are all one great heap of eternal sameness, which has been tricked into thinking of itself as single selves. … Then again, that was only one philosopher.'

'I like it,' Thor said. 'It feels as if I'm touching the whole of the world.'

 

* * *

 

But of course change simply was. The life that a man built up, layered in daubs and daubs of small experience, could be torn through in an instant, so deeply and thoroughly that the tear could not be patched over. For Loki it happened on the cusp of manhood: it was the summer before the autumn he was due to leave Valhalla, when hot rains spattered and receded, soaking the grass and the trees. He had been to an awful party, where there was no hope even for mischief; he had told his father's men, earlier, that he would be gone away for days, and found instead that he was spat back to the residence before midnight. Thor had stayed on with his fellows, and so Loki was alone, shooting aimlessly between library, bedroom, and kitchen, picking up books only to put them down again, lighting one cigarette with the end of another, sipping at homemade gin and tonics.

He would remember that, chiefly, about the night: that his last hours as the boy he had thought of as 'himself' were wasted on bored, thwarted, half-drunk wandering. It was as if he stood in the vestibule of his self, soon to be called in.

He had been marginally aware that Odin was entertaining a guest, that night, in his private dining rooms. During his fifteenth pace down the corridor, he heard men's voices emanating from behind closed doors. He knew well enough the sound of his father's shouting; besides that, there was the crisp, distinct ring of the Vanir accent. He crept close, and listened in.

In quick succession, he heard several things—torn-off scraps of phrases, giving a tattered impression of the argument. At times the voices fell so low that he could not hear them; he would press his ear to the oak of the door, and find that the sounds rose suddenly up into booming, so loud that he winced with the strength of vibration.

The louder scraps: 'How can you presume to keep a child from his fatherland?' — 'Asgard is his fatherland!' — 'A Jotun belongs to Jotunheim!' — 'I would be risking the lives of the people of my country!' — 'There is nothing to be done!' — 'When will he learn? If his brother dies without issue, and he finds that he is cast out of the line of succession?'

Softer: 'A thing like this oughtn't to have been kept from him.' — 'I am not without regrets.' — 'It has been done.'

The voices lifted to a climax, a stubborn crossing of swords. Loki's mind had slowed; by the time he heard footsteps nearing the door, he could think only in blocks, like a child. Man. Man. Oak. Pain in the head. Grain of the wood of the floor beneath feet. Hair tickling back of neck. In the room something had broken: glass? No, porcelain?

The door opened before him; the corridor was lit with the chandeliers, the flames of the candelabra. Loki squinted into light. It seemed, to him, a tableau, utterly still: a dark-haired, dark-bearded man, his palm against the wood of the door, and his father, in formal attire, medals pinned to his chest, standing near to the sideboard, shards of a plate scattered round him. That, Loki thought, was one of the Sèvres plates. The dinner service would be mismatched.

 

* * *

 

Hours later he sat in an armchair in Odin's reception room, looking across a coffee table at—his mother and father? Cups of tea sat cooling on the table. Frigga worried at a handkerchief; Odin reached up, impulsively, to tug at the strap of his patch. Loki tapped the ashes of his cigarette onto the carpet.

'My sister,' Frigga said—the hand at the handkerchief stilled— 'was very unlike me. She had odd ideas about the world. There might have been— … No, I shall cut to the quick. She had a queer fondness for Jotunheim, or for what it represented to her. As the Jötnar began preparing for war, she felt' —the hand at the handkerchief clutched— 'that their cause was a calling, for her. She believed in their ideals. She began waving flags about. It was only by the strength of our father that she was prevented from defecting. She was kept in Asgard during the war; but after the war ended, she travelled to Jotunheim, under pretense of charity work. Rebuilding houses, tending to the disabled... For that was our burden, too. I suppose we ought to have known that she would fall in love with a Jotun. She was that sort; she believed in embodying her ideals in her love. They—'

'He needn't know,' Odin said, 'about the love affair.'

'He is her child; it is his right.' She stopped speaking, then, as though she had been silenced; she looked at Loki with her lips parted, seeming to mean to speak, but saying nothing. He understood well enough what she meant: _They were your mother and father._

His cigarette had long since burnt out; he dropped it in the ashtray, and then was still.

'They had a child,' Frigga said. She looked down to her lap, bracing. 'None of us in Asgard knew it at the time. She felt it better not to give word. … The child was born the year the civil war broke out. There was a razing of the capitol. Some fled to the west; some fled to Asgard; some held their ground. … Laufey held his ground.'

'He aspired to power,' Odin said, in a dark mutter of an aside. 'He must have supposed that if he stayed in the city, he might have gained a foothold for the resistance, might perhaps establish himself as a leader. That isn't to say he was wrong for supposing; he did gain a foothold.' Odin laced his hands together; he bent his head, for a moment, then raised it. 'Enough of one that he posed a threat to the New Jötnar Army. That, in those days, was enough to be killed. They—'

'For God's sake, stop it!' Frigga had stood, driven up uncontrollably; she held herself between Odin and Loki, as if shielding Loki from what Odin meant to have said.

'Is it not his right,' Odin asked, 'to know of Laufey's death?'

'Not now,' Frigga said. 'I shall tell him all that he might wish to know, when he feels that he is prepared. … Do you wish to know now?'

Loki said, 'I want to hear how I came to be your ward.'

She pressed her hand to her forehead, paced across the room, turning away from Loki. He could see, still, that her shoulders trembled.

'Farbauti fled towards Asgard,' she said. 'She disguised herself as a Jotun, and went so far as the river Ifing, where the Aesir—'

'Guarded the crossings to Asgard,' Loki said. 'I know that. You've told me before.'

'Yes, I suppose I have told you so. Then you know. … The river, yes. For all that she had said about Jotunheim, when she was young... For all the flags she had waved, she knew that it wasn't... She knew that if her child was raised in Jotunheim, he would suffer. And so she revealed herself to an Aesir soldier, and bade him deliver herself and the child to Asgard. She—'

Frigga put her hands to her face. Then she let her hands fall. When she spoke again, her voice seemed a sort of haunting, an issuing from another realm.

'Before they had granted her passage, she was badly wounded. One of the New Jötnar Army had discovered that she was Aesir. Perhaps... No, you are concerned with the truth, which is that she died of her wounds, and that at her request, the child was transported to me, in Valhalla. … Odin and I—'

'That is all he needs to know,' Odin said. 'In Farbauti's honor, we raised you as our son.'

The story bobbed along the surface of the river of Loki's mind, never quite falling to the depths of it. He held the words in him—repeated to himself the words like child, executed, fled, suffer, died. Still it seemed nothing but another one of Frigga's lurid tales: the living and loving, the fighting and dying, of some faceless spectres, who had acted only in the interest of entertaining posterity. Certainly this was not a story of his own. Yet it was—Odin and Frigga had told him that it was his own.

He thought of his earliest memories: walking with Frigga in the gardens of the palace, dirtying his face in the mud; begging Odin to ring the ship's bell he had hung above his desk; sitting at the seaside with Thor, laughing at a gull pecking through the rocks. That was where his life had begun. Odin and Frigga were King and Queen of Asgard. Thor was Crown Prince of Asgard, son of Odin and Frigga, King and Queen of Asgard. He was Prince Loki of Asgard, brother to Thor, Crown Prince of Asgard, and son of Odin and Frigga, King and Queen of Asgard. He could remember crawling from his crib and seeing Frigga leaning over him, clucking that he had been naughty and had got to go to sleep. There was nothing else.

He looked at Odin, and thought, _This is my father._ It seemed so absolutely true, and so absolutely false, both at once. _I am Loki of Asgard._ True, false? It was like looking at an optical illusion, the sort that showed a beautiful woman upright and an old hag upside-down: Prince Loki of Asgard, orphan of Jotunheim, Prince Loki of Asgard, orphan of Jotunheim. It occurred to him that he didn't know who had given him his name.

'In her honor,' Loki said. He felt as if his voice issued out from the air around him; he had never felt so still, so sewn into his place. 'That's such a terrible lie. You would have tossed me to some commoner, if my presence wasn't worth something to you. What was it, then? Was I your bargaining chip? Something to be traded over to the Jötnar, when the time came?'

'You were my son,' Odin said. 'You have always been—my son. … I did feel that if I raised you well, you would have an understanding of the world which neither Aesir nor Jötnar could comprehend. I felt that you might do good—'

'An understanding of the world? From what? The vast fount of knowledge which springs from being lied to? The incredible insight one gains when one pretends to be a different person without realizing one is pretending? Was it to come from my blood?'

'You were to know,' Odin said, 'when you came of age. It oughtn't to have been—'

'Oh, you had meant to tell me! What a lot of good that did! … You must have wanted to ensure that I would learn to hate the Jötnar, like a nice Aesir boy ought to do. For of course diplomacy is only worth anything if the diplomat has got the right feelings— Loathes the right people—'

It felt like lying to say them, these things that ought to have come spouting molten from his core. He felt as if he were playing along with a story he had invented, feigning righteous anger just to see his father's face redden. His hands shook; he spat his words; and still he felt deadened, drained of real feeling. It would all be over, he supposed, if he stopped lying, and let the truth reclaim itself. He was only too proud to stop lying.

He swept his arm across the coffee table, so that the cups and saucers went sailing, smashing against the hardwood; he overturned the armchair, and the side table, so that the lamp and clock fell to the floor. He grasped at Odin's lapel, screaming, 'Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you tell me?' But all of it passed through him, like a cool wind—stirring the inside of him, then settling, so that he moved through time effortlessly.

He felt drunk, and unreal: all of the world was of the same substance, meaningless, swerving and slopping against its boundaries. Those were not his hands which smashed the saucers, those were not his hands which grasped the lapel. He was looking in on it, only. He was fading out of his own body, for it was not, after all, his own.

 

* * *

 

He did not sleep, the night he learned about himself. He drove Odin and Frigga away, and locked himself in his and Thor's bedroom; he paced from window to fireplace, fireplace to window, shaking. To look at Thor's things—his cricket bat and his picture of a horse and his adventure novels—shot sick up Loki's throat. Thor seemed, suddenly, to have stopped to be a real person. Someone else had put these things here. They were not real things at all. Loki did have a brother—he thought of the feeling of a hand on his back—water? He saw a golden-haired boy in the bed before him, and a golden-haired boy in the armchair by the hearth, and a golden-haired boy taking his face in his hands, and leaning in to kiss him; but none of them were the one that Loki wanted.

'Lying,' they said. 'They were lying to you.' Or: 'You were lying to them.' Or: 'They were lying to everyone. That is where you got it from.' Or: 'Stupid. That you didn't notice. Liar yourself and not noticing.' Or: 'Bad boy. All that and you were a bad boy.' Or: 'You don't believe them.' Or: 'You ought to.' Or: 'Bad.' Or: 'Go.' Or: 'Letter-opener on the desk. Stick it into your throat.' Or: 'Break the window. Use the glass. Filthy. Good end for a—'

There was a turn. There was a new calmness; the tangles untangled. The lead-weight of thought lifted off of him, and he could move again, look about again.

He saw, when he drew the drapes back from the windows, that the sun was burning furiously orange. That was the color of the sunrise, so beautiful that he could faint, so beautiful that he was light-headed as when he pulled himself into the vision of a painting. He burnt. Other lives were immaterial; only he, out of anyone, past or future, could rip away his blinders and see. Even Plato's souls, floating in the heaven of true forms, so brilliant that all of earth paled against it, could not see so truly as Loki saw. He felt as if he sat on the throne of the clouds, with the sunrise in and around him, firing outwards.

But, with the sunrise, there was something to be done, which he could not quite grasp. It must have been lessons. There were books piled on his escritoire—where was Thor, now late for lessons, and without having written his work?—he went to the library, where he saw a monograph he had been meaning to read. He was due to university in the autumn, and had got to show everyone else that he was better.

Time seemed to have slipped so quickly from his hands; he was pressed up against the future, crushed against the future, thrashing against the barrier. Yes, he was prepared. He sat in the window-seat and wrote. This, he thought, would be the key; he would be understood, if he wrote. Cosmic knowledge flared through the channels of his mind, desperate to be released. He wrote till the sun was at its height, and there was someone coming through the doors of the library.

It was Thor, who did not know what Loki knew, and stood small and mindless, inhabiting himself, hemmed in by limbs and skin.

'Mother,' he said, 'told me to see you.'

'Yes,' Loki told him, rising from the window-seat, walking through the shafts of stained sunlight that fell through the glass. 'She would have told you so; she would have felt that she ought to do. She is so kind, our mother, is she not? Hair always braided? Hands folded over stomach, looking over our father's shoulder? Such an immense presence; you too, brother, immense, inevitable, impossible. The whole of the world comes to you and you—put it at your feet? It is like a cup which you have not drunk from. I would drink from it!'

Thor was putting his hands at Loki's shoulders, as if holding him in place. Loki realized belatedly that he had been pacing, moving his arms through the air, gesturing to the thoughts which floated about him. He wriggled beneath Thor's grasp, and Thor said, 'Brother, you're not yourself.'

Loki began to laugh. 'Oh,' he said, 'I know, but you don't see it yet. You don't see it! Do you know that this will be the last day of your life in which you will not have seen it? It is so momentous—it is so monumental, Thor—brother! … Did you see the sun rise, this morning? I thought it was so terribly bright that it must have been a dream. It was like a picture; it was like an electric picture.'

'I saw a bit of the sun,' Thor said, shrugging his shoulders, tilting his head. 'It was—very pretty.'

Loki saw, then, looking at Thor—the red of his mouth, the pure blue of his eyes (like an electric picture)—how much he wanted him. The shelves and painted ceilings and stained, dust-thick light, the globes and the telescopes, the swords and the shields, all swam around him, unable to be grasped; Thor alone was whole. Thor did not know. Loki could have him one more time, before he did—and so kissed him.

Between kisses he gasped, 'I want—to have you now, now, right now.' And Thor was holding his jaw in his hand, smoothing his thumb across his cheek, breaking away to say, 'Yes, but tell me what it is that you've—'

'Not now,' Loki said. 'It isn't important. Come here.'

Thor was lapping his tongue across his lips; Thor was pulling his lip between his lips; Thor was kissing the thought out of him. Only need, overwhelming, which could be given into so easily because nothing was quite real. They were surrendering to the sort of wild pressing pleasure that came out of a wet dream; one wants, then, only to feel more of the good thing, which would stop to be good if the illusion were shattered.

There in the fire of the midsummer midday, Thor lowered Loki onto the sofa before the hearth, and rutted half-clothed against him. Loki felt, with his thighs cradling Thor's hips, and Thor's hands in his hair, and Thor's breath against his face, and Thor's face sunlit above his, that he stood in the last place of safety he would ever have. He told Thor to stop, then to start again, then to stop again; he liked best the still moments, in which they felt each other's warmth, and looked into each other's faces.

He saw only love in Thor's face, and wanted to see him weep. Soon enough. He laughed at the thought, and Thor thought he was laughing out of love.

When Loki spent, it was riotously good, the on-and-on sort of spending; his eyes rolled back and he wondered if Thor didn't see him like a picture of a saint, looking ever upwards. Probably Thor was not concerned about much else but getting his cock between Loki's thighs, which he did, and which he liked, enough to shut his eyes and thrust shouting into finish—but how golden his hair was in sun. How shining the sweat on his brow, which moistened Loki's skin as he put his face to Loki's shoulder.

Loki stroked at his hair, and said, 'Brother.'

Thor lifted his head. 'Yes?'

'You shall have to learn,' Loki told him, 'to stop answering to that.'

 

* * *

 

You are my brother. You are my brother. You have always been my brother. You will always be my brother. Brother. Brother. Brother. Brother. Brother. Brother. Brother. Brother. Brother. Brother. Brother. Brother. Brother. Love, love, love, love, love, love, you, brother, love you brother, I love you brother, I love you brother, I love you brother, I love you, I love you, brother, brother, brother, brother, brother, brother, brother, brother, I love you, brother, you, I love you, brother, you, brother, you, brother, brother, brother.

Mother, mother, mother, mother, mother loves you, brother, mother loves you, brother, father loves you, brother, father loves mother, brother, father loves brother and brother, mother loves father who loves brother who loves brother, brother loves father who loves brother who loves mother who loves brother, brother, brother.

'Brother, brother, brother'—Loki said this to Thor, to have him hear what he sounded like—'brother, brother, I love you, brother, come swim, brother, look at this, brother, yes, brother, why, brother, what's happened, brother, hello, brother, goodnight, brother, good morning, brother, brother, brother! Call me by my name!'

'...But I'm not,' he said, finally, still and desolate, sitting at the edge of his bed. He had screamed so loudly and for so long that his throat was pulpy. 'You may not call me it, because I am not your brother.'

Thor knelt at his feet, and held his hands in his hands. 'Lie down, Loki,' he said. He took Loki into his arms, and made to drop him into his bed.

Loki scratched at Thor's face, and kicked out of his grasp, giving hoarse, half-silent cries: 'Don't touch me, don't touch me, don't you bloody dare to touch me, Thor.' But the surge of the fighting impulse was leaving him, quickly; he began to want Thor to hold him, and began to want to scream at the thought, but could not bear to feel his throat any rawer.

He let Thor put him to bed. He swam through dreams, woke, swam, woke—Thor was at his bedside—rolled through the gentler plains of sleep, then felt recollection like a prick to the fingertip and flung himself up, tearing at the linen, shouting, grimacing at the pain in his throat.

Thor, holding fast to Loki's shoulders, pressed his forehead to Loki's. In the lullaby way, he said, 'Sleep, Loki, please. You must sleep. When you wake you will be well, again.'

'Do you love me?' Loki grasped at the fabric of Thor's shirt, pulling him down, holding him against him. 'Do you love me, still, even after you have known me for what I am?'

Thor said, 'On my word I will not stop loving you. No matter what you are. I will love you when you are bones.'

Loki let loose Thor's shirt; he fell back into the bedspread, laughing. 'I feel so sorry for you,' he said. 'You've been condemned to me. Does it frighten you? Are you frightened? Do you feel unwell? Do you feel damned? … Don't bother about it, Thor; I will save you from yourself.'

Whatever Thor might have said to him, then, would not have been of consequence. Always the same sound came drumming out of Thor, regular and foreseeable, like the tick of a well-wound watch. Brother, brother, brother, brother, spring, autumn, winter, summer, brother, brother, brother, brother, morning, midday, evening, night.

 

* * *

 

When he woke he saw that Thor's bed was empty. Thor slept in an armchair he had pulled to the side of Loki's bed; Frigga sat in a chair by the hearth, pulling tiredly through a novel. The drapes had been drawn open: through the windows Loki saw that the day was wet, and that mist hung over the farther rooftops. Small drops clung to the glass; shadows of the small drops speckled the linen.

Loki drew himself up and said, 'I want to go away.'

 

##  _the pilgrim_

**part one**

He cut his hair, one morning, during his first month in New York. August, so hot that he marvelled at how the sun could burn so brightly from so far away. Summer in the city was like nothing he had ever felt before; a haze rose from the pavement, the grass in the parks wilted, hydrants spurted into roads parting ten-story walk-ups. Everyone was out of doors.

Loki liked the city for this reason—it was a fishbowl, clear and open, colored with the diving and floating of small spirits. He could pass hours lying on his stomach on the bed he had pulled next to the window; he rested his arms on the sill, looked out at the world, and thought of it all as a puppet-play.

By dawn, most of the rooms in his view had gone dark. He looked out, anyway, that morning in August; he was awake, twisting bound in the Gordian knot of his hatred. He watched light rise pink over the tops of the buildings, and the last stars fade out of the upper sky. Some lights, long-burning, at last went out; some dark rooms were lighted, moved about in by an early riser.

Cool night was giving over to a hotter morning. Sweat clung to his brow, to the skin beneath the hair that fell over his neck and back; heat pocketed between his body and the bedclothes, dampening linen and clothing. He thought of being a child and leaping naked, alongside Thor, into cold water—shuddering at the chill, then rising to air so hot it seemed liquid. It was as if someone had driven a knife between his eyebrows, that slice of recollection; he howled towards the pink sky and toppled his bedside table, so that his lamp and books and glass of water fell, clattering, to the floor.

Loki could meet a man and in ten minutes convince him that his loving wife loathed him; he could turn life-long compatriots into enemies slobbering at the chance to get at each other's throats. He could not stop himself from thinking of the people he least wanted to think of. It had been a sort of torture, their shaping him, twisting him, trimming him; he had ripped himself away from those people—even when his mind said the words, he spat it, _those people—_ and found that still he was theirs, in soul if not in body.

Not in body, no. Now that he looked at himself clearly, he saw what he had missed before: unmistakably Jotun, the jutting brow, the mean line of the nose, the hollow eyes. He had drawn caricatures like this, and failed to see his own image. His hair alone, curling thickly over shoulders, might pass for Aesir; and so he would be rid of it.

He cut it then, beneath the slow drawing-up of sun. He sawed at massed fistfuls of hair with the straight-razor he used for shaving; he nicked his shoulders and neck, sometimes, with furious sweeps of the blade, and so swept ever more furiously. Locks of hair writhed on the floor, seeming a fungus in the low light; he swept it all up in a sheet of linen, and opened his window to toss the bundle into the street below.

He felt, in the faint wind slotting itself between the buildings, a cooling of the sweat on his neck, now bare. The line of the end of his hair struck out sharply against his jaw. How much lighter he felt. Leaning out of the window, he rolled his head from side to side, letting the air touch his neck and his shoulders.

Thor would be sad to see it gone; but he would smile and say, _You look well, brother!_

Loki thought of jumping from the window—the pavement did seem to be gently waving—then thought that that would be giving them what they wanted. He would live; by God, he would live. Neither pain nor vengeance in death. Only black space, inertia, lonely floating where he wanted blood.

He did nothing from the window but look out. There was a razor's-edge of brilliant orange, sliding along the tops of the buildings; when he craned his neck, he saw the last of night-blue. A star, he thought, might have pricked through—then again he was tired.

 

* * *

 

Nights unalone that August were hot not with sun solely, but with bodies. Bodies on silk divans in Midtown penthouses, or in a pool on a terrace fifty storeys into open sky; bodies up against trees in the squares of the Village, bodies against walls in small slits between tall buildings. Bodies in dinner clubs, loose with champagne and whisky-sodas, or in the filthy backrooms of discotheques in Soho, where with a pill or two on the tongue the world would stumble and fall into itself. Bodies of blond-headed heirs to industrial titans; bodies of men in grey suits, who liked to rumple themselves before their evening train; bodies of artists who spread Loki out over the cloths on the floors of their ateliers. Bodies doing the Twist or the Watsui, grinding out the heels of leather shoes on the tile of a dance-floor.

'Who are you?' these bodies would ask him.

He would say, 'No one,' and they would say, 'What?' and he would say, 'I'm not anything.'

Then they would take him home, feed him Benzedrine, and light his cigarettes for him; they would press him into a sofa, and kiss from his ear to his collar. That August, Loki let a man fuck him for the first time. He was coquettish through champagne and cigarettes and neck-kisses, coquettish till the man—who had Loki lying back against a dining table, his legs wide as a tart's—crept his fingers between Loki's thighs, saying, 'You've never been fucked before, have you?'

'I don't know,' Loki said, lifting his voice into the upper registers. 'If I hadn't, would you make it good for me?'

The man lowered him to the floor, and fucked him into the carpet. Loki's back pulled through the fibers, and the legs of an Eames chair juddered in and out of his vision, and he felt only the smallness of the moment. Something was happening to his body—yes, but where was the enormity? Where was the sense that he had done something irrevocable, had burst the glass out of the windows of his mind? Rather it was a tapping of pebbles against the windows of his mind: noisy for a while, and after the end of it, nothing.

He asked the man, later, 'And who are you,' but did not mind about hearing the answer. He knew who he was: not his brother.

'If my brother could see me now,' he muttered, once, as his face was pressed to the inside of someone's sitting room window, each thrust into him rubbing him forward, the skin of his cheek streaking oil against the glass. He half-wished someone on the street below had seen him, and was photographing him, and would run the photographs on the front page of the _Daily Moon_. Body blurred in newsprint, screaming for Thor to look at the cesspit he had loved.

Towards the end of the summer Loki began to keep company with the sort of men who slid rings onto their fingers and battered their fists into noses till the metal was slicked in blood. He saw men kick teeth into pavement, and fracture skulls with the butts of pistols. Loki liked to see these things, for he had two of his own guards, straight-shouldered and black-suited; Odin had insisted he take guards, but Loki had had his pick of the lot, and he chose a pair who could be bought. They floated behind him, spectre-like, and Loki supposed that if he did have guards, he ought to do the sort of thing that would necessitate them. Drugs, drink, cruelty. Bodies and bodies, and very little of the mind.

Once, he goaded one of those blond-headed heirs to climb out of his window and down the fire escape, and take Loki for a drive in his father's Coupe de Ville. Through the rainforest-wet of the summer night, they drove; the boy took the wheel, at first, spinning screaming through red lights, till they clipped a corner and careened into another car.

There was a thunderstorm of metal; then the boy was screaming, 'He'll kill me, he'll kill me,' and Loki slid before the wheel, usurping the boy from the driver's seat. He rocketed the car into reverse, maneuvered through a tricky turn, and sailed away laughing, wailing operatically to the song on the radio.

When at last he looked over to the boy, he saw that he was fish-eyed in terror, puddling into the leather of the seat. Again, Loki laughed. Here he was, alone, in possession of his body enough to drive a car, in possession of his mind enough to have a boy trembling in fear of him. He was in another country. There was a dancing song on the radio, and the night wind through his hair.

 

* * *

 

St. Ives reminded him of the fishpond in the gardens of the palace at Valhalla. Bordered on all sides by arbors, the pond slipped and sputtered into itself; the water ran over smooth, mossy rocks, flicked dots of itself against tall grasses, ferns, the yellow beads of saxifrage and slipperwort. A low wooden bridge crossed over lily pads. In the water, white fish curled around each other, stirred by the dripping of small fountains.

On and on the fish went, in winter and summer, through fallen leaves and fallen blossoms, curling and curling, passing against each other, gathering to eat, dispersing, gathering, swept along through quiet waters. That was St. Ives: a senseless moving-about inside of beautiful bounds, a repetition so calming that it was like meditation. Loki studied philosophy only because he knew enough about it that he would not have to work. He liked to sit in lectures just to look at his classmates. Writing papers was soothing as walking in circles. And at the gardens in Valhalla, the lily pads floated indifferently along the surface of the water.

Loki kept rooms in a large white-brick building called Milton House, identifiable at a distance by a domed bell-tower. Inscribed in the marble tablet above the entrance was a Latin phrase which meant, more or less, 'he recalls to us that we are dust'. It was a custom for the residents of the house to wield this as a laughing warning to each other: 'As the lesser Milton reminds us...' The joke being that whoever said it was really hubristic as Lucifer; that was the sort of person who lived there.

Dust, though, he could well have been. His someoneness—his aura of being assuredly _someone,_ never mind what anyone really knew of him—was unremarkable at St. Ives, where everyone glittered with a certain someoneness. Keeping company with concert pianists and chess masters, he felt himself kicked in the back of the knees by capitalistic sentiment, which dictated that anyone whose power had originated in monarchy was vulgar, and best off snubbed at meals. He hadn't even the slight advantage of hailing from an interesting monarchy; Asgard was known primarily for its production of preserved fish, and for having been an actor in one of those baffling Northern wars.

If Loki did not know what he knew about himself, he would have been livid. He would have demanded that they call him Your Highness, and avert their eyes when speaking. As it was, there was a freedom in stepping out from under such shadow. He went by Odinson, as per the American custom; the name meant as much to his schoolmates as the name Windsor might have meant to an Alpine goat. Months into his first term, he realized that not a single person had asked him about his brother.

'It reminds me of my brother,' he groaned once, unthinkingly, when asked to play rugby.

The boy who had asked him said, 'You have a brother?'

 

* * *

 

'You have a rare mind,' one of his professors told him, one lingering autumn afternoon. The sun hovered in the frame of the bell tower of Milton House, which one saw clearly from the windows of the professor's office. Motes floated in the last red lines of light.

Loki, thinking of walking by the tennis courts before the sun set, said absently, 'Yes.'

'I've found that the rarer of minds, when not lashed in by a certain will, have the tendency to divert themselves into pockets of interest quite apart from the usual areas of study. I can pretty quickly reckon to where a bright student diverts his mind—love affairs, I find, but that... Not every case, of course, but one knows where the newer hearts, well... I say, only because I find myself curious about your own endeavors.'

Mired in thoughts of the tennis courts, Loki had pressed a finger to his lips, rubbing idly over the crease. At the professor's discomfited cough, he flicked his eyes up, and caught the man looking pointedly at his mouth.

'Religion,' Loki said. 'I'm very religious. The Eucharist, penance, faith and good works, adoration, veneration...incense. All of the necessities of mortal life. One does feel philosophy has got a bit above its station, where that is concerned.'

Said, of course, because there was a small framed portrait of Schopenhauer propped up on the bookshelf behind the professor's head, and because the professor had published several translations of Nietzsche.

'I,' Loki went on, 'am terribly glad that we shall all be done with our earthly lives, at some point or another.' (For there was a page of a paper on eternal recurrence, still lodged in the professor's typewriter.) 'We shall shuffle off the mortal coil, and hey presto, the afterlife.'

'One needn't collar the mind, at your age. I can lend you a series of articles... If you do prefer the ancients, you might look into—well, Zeno, for a start... You have a quick mind, Odinson; I feel you might do well to concern yourself with a...'

'Oh, well. I'm only piddling about in university to kill time before I go into the priesthood. Which reminds me'—he leapt from his seat; the bell tower was tolling six—'I'm late for evening Mass. But what a lovely talk we've had. I do like to find kindred minds. Perhaps we could meet to discuss Thomas Aquinas?'

At the courts, sunset filtered through the links of the fences. Balls popped and pocked, launched hither and thither by the well-toned arms of young men in white. It was dark enough, then, that bodies were only silhouettes against the sunset. Sometimes a curve of arm or leg would slip out of shadow and into a pool of red light. From the wood to the north of the courts, birds called, soft under grunts and shouts of 'thirty, love!'

It was during these moments that Loki most felt his own potential. The thought of what he was capable of sat heavy and unopened inside of him; it was like fluid that had gathered and would burst if not released. He could do so much. He could beat the son of the vice president of America at tennis; he could linger at the courts till some sweat-dewed, noble-jawed boy asked him if he wanted to get in a little practice, meaning did he want to play a little tennis and then go to one of their rooms and fuck each other's thighs. He could turn back to the academic buildings, pick the lock to his professor's office, and burn his paper on eternal recurrence, both typed and written copies. He could take the late train into the city, and go drinking in the Village till dawn.

How funny that he had thought himself limited. Asgard had had the air of a hothouse, stifling and thick; it had withered him, he who was not suited. But there he was, thinking of Asgard again. The bend in his stalk, the curl to his leaves, reminded him of how he had been stifled. … His hair was tickling at the back of his neck. Inattentively, he rubbed his hand over his nape, and had a sudden chill of ghost-memory: someone else's hands, broad and warm, pressing over the upper notches of his spine.

There was, also, a sweat-dewed, noble-jawed boy before him, saying, 'It's Odinson, isn't it? I'm Hall. We're both in DeLarge's lecture on ethics. You wouldn't want to go for a few rounds of practice?'

 

* * *

 

At the weekends he stayed at his apartment in the city, and returned to what had been his summer life. Against the careful arrangement of St. Ives' white brick and elm, the city was a behemoth. Every meter of its great, stolid body was slicked over with rot. At St. Ives, during sleepless nights, Loki heard the hooting of owls, the humming of crickets; in the city he heard the endless bleating of taxis, struck through sometimes by drunken shouting. St. Ives evenings one spent in the pursed-lip sipping of old whisky; the city goaded one to pour gin down the gutter of one's throat, and vomit unashamedly in the street.

Loki rejoiced in rocketing between such clean and such unclean. He kept his rooms at St. Ives in eggshell paint, freshly-picked flowers in majolica vases on the windowsills, linen navy-striped, books arranged by subject on the shelf above his desk. His apartment in the city he stuffed with ostentation: antique bronze he bought at auction, English silver and Italian pictures, jade figurines and painted spoons, a drawer-full of naughty-naughties. He bought a brass samovar from a Russian dealer, and thought obliquely of a line from a poem: _if I'd had a samovar then, I'd have made him tea..._ He polished the brass till he could use it as a mirror.

If he were siphoning from royal revenue to pay for it all, he would have felt he slept steeped in shit. He supposed he ought to have wanted to wring Odin of all he was worth, but hated the thought of that look in Odin's eye, the look of knowing that it was Asgard which kept Loki in company of his favorite _fanfreluches_. Loki would have some splendors to himself; so he stole, or else charmed money out of the people who wanted to sleep with him.

'What say we go down to the city, for a while?' Hall, the boy from the tennis courts, asked Loki, once. 'I want to be alone with you. Let me show you around. I know a few places.'

'Oh, but—' Loki cast his eyes downwards; he bit at his lip, worried at the sleeve of his shirt. 'It's funny. I've spent my last seventy dollars getting Edmund Corcoran out of jail—it was drunk and disorderly—and Papa's revoked my allowance. I can't bear admitting it, but I couldn't—'

'What does it matter?' Hall laughed. He clapped his arm at Loki's back, and smiled widely at him. 'It'll be my treat. And—look, here's seventy for the trouble with Corcoran. He's always getting other people into debt. Better to ignore him when he comes looking for you. But you're foreign; I guess you wouldn't know.'

And at a party on the Lower East Side, behind a locked door, with a red cloth thrown over the window in lieu of real drapes, Loki watched a boy sitting at the edge of the bed, holding the telephone in his lap, unhooked; the man was bent over his own lap, clumsy hands slipping at the handle of the receiver, drawing halfway up only to slump down, again. Loki patted the boy's pockets and retrieved a bottle of pills, which could be easily sold, then rifled through the boy's wallet: fifty dollars in cash, the key to a post office box, a telephone number written on the back of the business card of an architect, a telephone number written on the cover of an empty matchbook.

Loki took the telephone from the boy, and dialled the number on the business card. A woman with a timid voice answered, saying, 'Yes, hullo?'

Speaking through his smile, he said, 'You don't happen to know a young man, about twenty, light brown hair and freckles?'

'Louis?' (It could have been Lewis.) 'Yes, I'm his sister. Who's calling, please?'

Whatever faint fizzle of amusement Loki might have felt dropped quickly away. He was only cold, numb-faced, clutching tightly to the telephone. He imagined her: some years older than the boy, with light brown hair and freckles, the same up-turned nose as the boy on the bed, exfoliating her face before turning in for the night. He imagined himself on the bed, eyes half-lidded, fingers boneless, jaw slack; and the freckled boy telephoning Thor, saying, 'Aren't you proud of your little brother? Your filthy, hopeless little brother?'

'Yes,' Loki said to the sister. 'You must be... He's spoken so much of you, but I can't recall your name, you're...?'

'Theresa?' With increasing strain: 'Who is this? It's very late.'

'I'm someone of importance. You would be thrilled to know me. But this concerns your brother; he's at 401 East 6th Street, apartment 302, in the room with the red cloth over the window. You can spot it from the street. He's asked for you to come to him. You see, he isn't well; also, he's been robbed. Goodnight, Theresa.'

Loki returned the telephone to its place on Louis' lap. Louis rubbed his hand over the cord and leaned sideways, his chin against his chest; he mumbled a plea for a cigarette. Loki replaced the key, the business card, and the matchbook, and took his blessed leave.

His driver idled on the street before the building. Loki climbed into the leather-scent of the car, lighted a cigarette, and told the driver to take him eight blocks west, for there was a night to be had.

 

* * *

 

'What do you think about definition?' Meticulously, Loki dipped the hairs of a thin brush into a pot of nail varnish; he extended his right hand along the arm of his chair, and drew a stripe of glistening black across the center of his thumbnail. 'I can talk so endlessly about it; but I ought to ask you what you think, first. Tell me, do you believe in goodness?'

'Of course,' the man said. For a moment he lifted his head; his silver hair shone yellow in the dim lamplight. 'There are people who don't like to believe in it; but I've thought, if the idea has been around for so long, it's got to have a basis in something.'

'How would you define it, then? If it is a thing you believe exists.'

'Well, on first thought I would define it according to the situation. Goodness in a doctor is the saving of life; goodness in a philanthropist is the giving of money, and so on.'

'Ah, but'—having finished the thumbnail, he put the brush to his forefinger—'all of these little goodnesses have a common nature, yes, which is goodness itself? The little goodnesses are the expressions of the greater goodness?'

'You might say that. It is one word.'

'Then what is the greater goodness? If not a single action done, if always intersecting with other acts, virtues, vices? If a philanthropist contributes to a new wing at the hospital, and a doctor in the new wing saves a life, what have they got in common? And what in common then with the man who drops a nickel into the cup of a beggar? Good if the beggar is a poor, blind man, good if the beggar is a murderer? Good of the nickel-dropper regardless of what he knows about the beggar? If divided into accidental good, intended good, intentional good, what, then, is good in purest form? What about all good acts does the word—damn.'

Varnish had splattered onto his knuckle. He set down the brush and rubbed at the splatter with the heel of his hand; black smeared across knuckle and heel both. Sighing, he uncrossed and recrossed his ankles; the silver-haired man, upon whose back Loki rested his feet, gave a slight cough.

'I think,' the man said, speaking up from where he stood on hands and knees, 'that in most cases, you would find that you turn naturally to a more subjective stance...'

'Oh, no, no. We won't do that. No, I don't like to think of the ancients looking down at us, or, as it were, up at us. I did think, years ago, that I had the whole of the world inside of me. It made sense to me then. … If you would be still, thank you.'

The silver-haired man went still. Quietly, so as not to move, he said, 'The whole of the world inside of you. I see how you might have thought that.'

Loki, tilting his head down to look at the man, smiled fondly, like a father. How well these new men thought they knew him. He had told this one that he was the son of a Vanir-English 'businessman,' businessman meaning racketeer; that he had worked as an escort in London, and that he had a standing reservation at Le Mot Juste, which everyone was fighting each other to eat at. He had been planning and cancelling dates there for weeks. 'I don't want French,' he would whine, clutching at the man's lapels, stroking his cheek in pleading.

When he thought to be rid of the man, he would make a date, stand him up, and let him embarrass himself in insisting that he _did_ have a reservation, if only the host would look for the name Svein Arnison, it is on the list, and would he be allowed to take just a peek in the dining room, where the boy would certainly be waiting... That would not be for some time yet.

Loki, in minute, delicate motion, gave the last stroke of paint to the nail of his little finger. He fluttered his hand in drying, and said, 'Your back must ache. I shall tell you about it another day.'

 

* * *

 

One February evening, Loki lay with a girl on the floor of her studio, drinking cherry schnapps and watching the rain on the windows. It was the sort of night in which the air itself was hostile; wind battered through long coats, twisting scarves and ruffling hair. Loki had shed his overcoat and jumper, and lay in thin cotton shirt against the carpet, for he felt more whole in the cold.

He had told this girl, over the course of four months, that he was a model from Muspelheim, a Shakespearean actor, an engineering student at the polytechnic, a retired drug runner. She would say, sometimes, smoking a cigarette on the corner, or eating eggs at the diner, 'But who are you, really?' He would tell her, 'Come here, and I'll show you my portfolio,' or 'I can recite the whole of Henry V; just listen to me.' She would roll her eyes, and say, 'You'll let it slip, one day.'

In February he did, in a sense. With his mind half-dead from drink, and his mouth stinging with it, he rubbed the back of his hand over his forehead, looked out at the windows rolling over themselves, and said, 'I'm from Jotunheim.'

'Huh, of course you are.' She fumbled, with numb hands, to light a cigarette. Mumbling around it, she said, 'The place where they send political prisoners north to die? All of those factories up near the Arctic Circle, where the sun doesn't set? … Did you have a girl, there? Some blonde in furs?' She spoke in the way she did when she wanted him to spin a story that was thrilling and absolutely untrue.

'No girl.' He took her cigarette from her; he filled his lungs with smoke, held his breath, and let the smoke out in thick oval rings. He said, in the story-voice, 'I never had parents. Or, I did, and they were killed, when I was just a babe in arms. My father was beheaded in a public square, during the civil war, and his body parts were strung up on the lampposts. My mother, poor dear, was gutted. There was only my older brother and I—quite, as one says, _contra mundum_. We were raised by our mother's sister, who worked at one of those factories. We ate pickled herring each night for supper, and had fleas. We loved each other, but none of the other little urchins would go near us; so when it came time for cock-stands and spots, we fucked each other, out of desperation. Rather good, the fucking. Kisses tasted like pickled herring.'

'You god damned liar,' she said, kicking her feet with laughing.

'Yes,' he said, 'you're right. Inveterate. Can't be helped. … Really I'm a prince of Asgard.'

'What story do you have about that?' She rolled onto her stomach, and took the cigarette from between his lips. 'Out with it; don't disappoint me.'

He feigned thinking for a moment. He ought to have thought of real Asgard, ought to have felt a memory, vivid as life, come shooting out of his subconscious: the scents and sights of a summer twilight by the fjord, or fresh-fallen snow at the northern lodge, or Thor cupping his jaw in his hand and kissing him warmly. Yet nothing. He felt mostly that he was ill, and that the windows would not stop moving.

'So greedy for stories,' he told her. 'I'm not a fount of them.'

 

* * *

 

But he was a fount of them. He told so many lies about himself that if there had been a truth, he would have forgotten it. There was not a truth, exactly; there was a story he had been told. For all that Odin and Frigga had been frightened of the truth, it was impossible to get hold of. He learned quickly enough not to waste himself on the effort.

Sometimes, when he lay sleepless in bed, he told himself lies. His mother had a mouth like the cupid's bow of a girl on the cover of a fashion magazine. His father had gone to the axe bearing the flag of Jotunheim. His father's enemies had put his head on a pike, and thrust it, still bleeding, towards his mother, who lay weeping against stained cobblestone. He had been born in a shell of a house, half rubble from bombing, in which his father kept the piano that had been the piano of his father before him. He visualized it all as a sweeping Hollywood epic: Gary Cooper as his father, gazing proudly into the horizon, and Grace Kelly as his mother, the white-haired little-nosed Aesir darling, gliding towards disaster. Swell of the orchestra at the rolling head. Panning shot of the desolate border, and the woman clutching a bundle to her arms. Every twitch of the hand would have been so magnificent.

When he walked in the city, and saw mothers and fathers with their children, his mind seemed to latch to them; he wondered, would this be the way my mother and father would have raised me? If they had lived in better times, would they have dragged him to school by the tail of his overcoat? Let him sip from their cup of coffee? Taken him to museums? Carried him on their shoulders? Let him press his face to the windows of the department stores? … Heavens, no, they wouldn't have done. Loki considered it anyway.

What had been his real life crept farther and farther from him. He found himself saying, to someone he had met at some party, 'My brother and I liked to jump into a hole cut into the ice on the lake—yes, we grew up in Asgard—oh, we were acclimated—he would shout, anyway,' realizing only slowly that those were real memories he saw in his mind: the ice, the black water, the redness of Thor's skin in cold, the sound of Thor's shouting across snow.

 

* * *

 

He received letters, sometimes; not dropped in his box but delivered through his guards, who drew the envelopes from their breast pockets and with a stiff nod gave them to Loki. Some envelopes carried the crest of the Royal Palace in Valhalla, in which case the letterhead, too, bore an embossed crown. This stationery meant either Odin or Frigga. Loki could tell by the salutation— _My dearest son_ if Frigga; _Dear Loki_ if Odin—whether it was to be read or burnt.

God knew what Odin could have had to say to him; Loki never looked. Frigga vacillated between careful distance— _I hope you are well_ , or _What are you reading?_ —and an extending of the hand, quietly hopeful. _Where the care of a human life is concerned_ , she once wrote, _there are very few true paths. I chose the path I felt was true at the_ — He had crumpled the paper, at that.

Thor's letters came always in the thin, grey envelopes distributed to the men at the academy. His script, looping and ink-spattered, bled through the paper, so that at first glance the letters seemed to be made up of a jumble of marks. If Loki felt generous, or desperate, or lonely, or hateful, he sat beneath the lamp at his desk and puzzled out the words.

Thor's charm, which in person shone so brightly out of him that one felt one should cover one's eyes, was in letters painfully dulled. His sense of warmth came largely from his face, which lumbered from feeling to feeling, giving everything up along the way. Stripped of that window, his conversation was blunt and circuitous. Quite nice, the scenery at Idavoll, all of those firs; but tough work, and the war games are perplexing, and the food is horrid. How cold New York this time of year, how hot New York this time of year, is there curling at St. Ives, is there ice on the river at St. Ives. Would you speak to Mother and Father, Mother does worry, you do mind that Mother does worry. He signed off with _All my love, Thor_.

Loki would pass three years knowing only this of Thor. The boy who had been his brother—whom he had seen, and touched, and smelt—evolved into a figment, malleable in the mind. There was a young man called Thor, Crown Prince of Asgard, who did live in the world; he wrote Loki Laufeyson letters, in which he crossed out 'brother' if he had written it before catching himself.

In time Loki hadn't to put thoughts out of his mind. He stopped to hear Thor's voice, echoing in the chamber of his skull, tossing up little comments on whatever passed in front of him. He could summon up the voice if he desired it, but found that he desired it less and less. He grew used to unfamiliar voices, unfamiliar hands on him, unfamiliar beds, unfamiliar views from unfamiliar windows.

Rarely, at ten on a long winter night, or at four in the morning in summer, after having gorged himself on unfamiliarity, Loki convulsed with longing. If he was with another person, he would push them away, spitting insults; he could not bear to be touched, when so touched by memory.

'You all right?' a man asked him, once, after he had lurched out of bed and staggered onto the balcony, shaking.

Loki took the man by his shoulders and thrust him against the barrier of the balcony, so that his back curved over the top of the rail and his feet lifted slightly from the ground. He held him there, within a hair's breadth of toppling sixteen storeys, shaking his shoulders and screaming, 'You wouldn't touch me if you knew! You wouldn't look at me!'

Then, snapping into a sudden, supreme placidity, he said, 'But you don't know. And so you have touched me, and you do look at me, and you have liked to do it.'

'Knew what?' the man asked.

Loki nearly pushed him just to escape from the chance that he might answer; but tears were welling in the man's boggling, ugly eyes. Loki realized that the man did not see he was only torn up with longing. He must have thought Loki a towering, threatening half-stranger. He must have been frightened of him.

When he returned to his own apartment, that night, Loki took his stationery and fountain pen from the drawer of his desk, and in careful presses of the nib, wrote, _Here the winter is beginning to ease off, I feel, though I may be premature in declaring it finished. Not overmuch of the snow has been cleared from the streets. One begins to want warmer nights, and longer days. I imagine there the winter will overstay its welcome..._

 

* * *

 

In spring of his second year away, he saw in the paper, which was Aesir and delivered to him specially, that Odin would be in Washington, D.C. for a conference on petroleum. He glanced at the paper without really reading it. Three days later, as he strolled along the path to his lecture hall, he found that one of his guards fell into step alongside him.

'Your Highness,' said the guard, 'your presence is requested in the small dining room at Milton House.'

The small dining room, which seated about eight, was used only when reserved, often for the purpose of carrying out what could be termed _rendezvous_. Loki supposed that it was one of the young men he had got to know: Hall, wanting to cut class to drink sherry, eat quail eggs, and talk about Locke—or else one of those ropy, grim-faced boys from Svartalfheim. Loki thought nothing of the summons except that he would prefer the boys from Svartalfheim to Hall, who had begun to cling.

Outside of the door to the dining room stood another Aesir guard. Loki wondered, idly, why he had had a new guard assigned him. When the door opened he saw that Odin sat at the head of the table. In his presence the table seemed a dais built solely for the purpose of housing him; he was drawn-mouthed and pale, somber as when he held court. Before him were a selection of breakfast things, set neatly out for two: coffee, tea, croissants, pastries, jam and preserves and butter.

Loki nearly turned out of the room; but Odin told him, 'You may go, if you wish it,' which had spite roiling hot in his throat.

He would stay. He supposed that if Odin had thought to make him his son, he retained the right to terrorize him with his presence, as a real son might have done. So he sat. He unfolded his cloth napkin, crumpled it, wiped his nose with it, and tossed it onto the table before him, whereupon he was quiet and attentive, back straight, head raised.

'What a long time it's been,' he said. 'Naturally you've been having the guards peep in on me. We might do away with the “how-do-you-do”s.'

'The river,' Odin said, referring to the river that ran through the middle of St. Ives, 'is much larger than I had remembered it. I watched the rowers, this morning, as the dawn broke. They're rather quick. … Thor hasn't accompanied me. He is at Idavoll.'

'Good,' Loki spat. 'I don't give nearly as much of a damn about your son as you do.'

'Have you read my letters?'

'Did you think I would?'

'No,' Odin said.

That he had seen Loki, and laid him out so clearly, made Loki wither into himself. No, Loki would not have read the letters. Odin had not hoped. He had not sat at his desk, pen in hand, praying for a response; he had not imagined the day when his son, his true son, would come into his arms again, strong and happy, having been made whole by his pilgrimage.

Odin was reaching for a croissant, buttering it unconcernedly, sipping at his coffee, smoothing out his napkin. He moved with the grace of an untroubled man; it seemed he had centuries to bite, to chew slowly, to sip. It was as definite a statement as if he had said, with a casting-out of the regal arm, _No one in the world would weep for you_.

Loki poured himself a cup of white tea. He held the cup in both palms; he raised it slowly to his mouth, and with his eyes raised to Odin, sipped.

'How does it feel?' he asked, with the cup still warming his hands. 'To be rid of me at last? What a relief it must have been. Two years of bliss. No more sitting at your desk, sleepy-eyed, pretending to listen to the Jotun boy babble about the books he's read. No more tiptoeing past the Jotun boy, for fear he'll wake and see that you're going away without him. No more lending your wife out as a mother to a child who was never—'

'Take care, boy!' Odin had become rigid, suddenly; he sat with his shoulders raised, his chin thrust out, dropping his butter knife to the table. 'You have gone a step too far.'

Loki smiled into the rim of his teacup, and took a long, relishing sip. 'I would say that lying to a boy for eighteen years made eighteen years of steps too far. Remind me of the score?'

Odin was still for a long while, watching, seeming to be teasing out Loki's under-self. At last he said, 'It doesn't suit you, this brand of falseness. One sees you are working at it; you are like a clock without a face. … If you were to swallow your pride, and come to me unarmored, I would accept you.'

'The way you accepted me as a child? Telling me that I was a fool, locking me up in the residences, sending me away, that I might not dirty Thor with the filth of—my companionship? Telling me that I hadn't yet earned such a simple thing as love? That I didn't deserve love, because I had not earned it?' Loki slammed down his cup with such force that the tea slopped over the rim of the glass; a pale stain spread in the white tablecloth.

To have raised his voice, to have slammed his glass, made him flush with shame. He folded his hands in his lap and looked out of the window, where small white blossoms fluttered in breeze. There were boys running over the quadrangle below, smacking each other with their satchels, pulling at the tails of each other's shirts. In the quiet of the room, the sound of Odin's knife and fork against his plate was so loud that Loki wanted to scream.

'You will,' Odin said, 'in time, come to understand the uniqueness of your position in the world, and the uniqueness of your potential. I welcome your anger. I welcome it knowing that when you clear the speck from your vision, your anger will pass.'

'I will never be'—he curled his lip; he caught Odin's gaze, and stared—'your peacemaker. I will never be your diplomat. I know nothing of Jotunheim; how could I? I've never met the stain of a man who made me. Thor was born to ascend. Very well, let him ascend! I was born—to what? Nothing! Not to unite Asgard with Jotunheim. Not to be Asgard's quaint little Jotun envoy. Not to be the king; not to be the son of the king; not to be the brother of the true prince. … Now I am nothing. Let me have it. Let me have my nothing.'

Odin sat back, resting his arms along the arms of his chair, lighted with the cordial sun. He said, 'You may have it, then.'

It was as if Odin was filled with some substance of senselessness, some thick fluid which absorbed Loki's anger and spat it out against him. Loki stung, seared through by the pain of his own impotency.

Through the window came the muffled shouts of the boys on the quadrangle, wrestling on the fresh-cut grass, staining their trousers in it. Odin seemed something from another time, a likeness drifted out from a blackened canvas; he was too cruel for this late spring, this warmth, this sun. Loki, with his skin so pale that his veins showed, with his lip curled in hissing, must have looked just as foreign to the day.

The boys on the quadrangle had gone away, by the time Loki left Milton House. It was half an hour into the first morning classes, and the quadrangle was silent. As he walked, Loki breathed in the scent of the cut grass, the tickle of the pollen, the tender warmth which arose in the absence of wind. His hands shook, and so he put them in the pockets of his trousers; but then came a tugging of lip, a tremble of chin, a tightness in his eyes and throat. He had only to be frightened of weeping before he was weeping. He sat on a bench in a hidden alcove, and hid his hot face in his hands.

 

* * *

 

Odin was due to return to Asgard that evening. Loki saw the dates of the visit in the paper, which he did read, then, with prickling cheeks and aching eyes. He lay awake through the early hours, turning to one side and then another, linen knotting at his legs. At the wall, the strange shadows of tree-branches struck into the paler blue of the moonlight; it was only by the fading of the moonlight, and the darkening of the shadows, that he knew the sun was rising. On and on he turned, clutching the linen in his fists, beating his head against the pillow.

For nearly two years he had crushed his anger inside of the meat of him. There forgotten, it had hardened into a sort of black diamond, inviolable, which, at the scent of Odin, struck as a spear through the lull of his new life. It hurt—it hurt—God, but it hurt to have something tear out from inside of him. He lay thrashing with this pain, soaked in the blood of it, beneath the light of the rising sun. It was as if Odin, with one flick of the finger, had banished Loki from peace.

He was banished from peace—he thought so, as he rose from his bed, dressed, went padding down the vacant halls of Milton House and into the clean, dewy grass of the quadrangle. There was such beauty around him—he was banished from beauty.

He rubbed his fingers over the petals of fallen blossoms, felt the dew on the leaves of the hedges, scratched his nails against the bark of a tree. There was no pleasure in it. Insensate, he fell to his knees on the grass. He curled his hands into the soil. It was soil he ought to have been in; he had cheated fate, by living, by growing, and now did penance.

With his knees stained in grass and his hands browned with soil, he rose. He walked through the dew, towards the house again.

 

* * *

 

The grass began to brown with heat, and all of the American boys scattered out to Bordeaux or Annecy or their father's places in East Hampton. The foreign students, or the deeply unhappy ones, lingered in half-empty houses over the summer sessions—smoking, listening to the radio, thumbing through popular novels. The autumn and spring Loki found too cluttered; in winter and summer, when St. Ives was stiller, he could do his proper work.

He fell in, very naturally, with the handful of students who could be counted among Asgard's enemies. The Chitauri, for instance, had wandered from country to country, seeking a home they had lost at the hands of the Aesir; Thanos, who had been raised in Asgard, had a trailing of scars on his chin and a passionate desire to found a Chitauri state. Malekith and his coterie of Svartalfar, all waxen and glassy-eyed, hailed from a city on the border between Asgard and Svartalfheim, where there had been contention over a section of land. They belonged by law to Asgard but by heart to Svartalfheim, and had dreams of raising the Svartalfar flag.

Hall was not an enemy of Asgard—he had known little of the country at all, before he had met Loki—but was one of the deeply unhappy ones. He would read a book if Loki told him to, would carry Loki's satchel if Loki told him to, would pick a lock or steal a file if Loki told him to; he would do all of this and look at Loki still with starry eyes, with a flushing face. He was ripe enough.

This band of young men slipped smoothly beneath the surface of the fishpond. To the American boys they were 'those foreign fellows, hallo, hej då, takk! Min salmon est kalt! Developed a taste for the Northerners, eh, Hall? They want you to ride them like reindeer?' In that sort of world, they could sit unbothered at the town bar, half-drunk on Schlitz, eating hamburgers and talking of Asgard's failures. There were the petroleum regulations—'Bleeding hearts, who gives a damn about the ocean?'; the whisperings of military brutality at the border of Jotunheim; the dubious good works—'Christ, you might look at the poor of your own country'; certainly the obvious despotism.

'How do I know you'll not have us all executed for treason?' Thanos asked, one evening in the dining hall, as the dissenters gathered over steak and potatoes.

'Because one isn't executed for treason any longer,' Loki said, cutting carefully into his steak. 'One is simply locked up and brutalized. I should think you would be willing to bear a bit of brutalization in the name of your cause.'

'Would you?' Thanos hissed, leaning forward to grasp Loki's wrist, to still the movement of his knife. 'Would you bear being starved, and beaten? Kept in the dark, at the bottom of a filthy hole, till you went so mad you swallowed your tongue? Would you bear having your teeth ripped out, your fingers broken?'

'Absolutely not.' Loki jerked his hand out of Thanos' grip, and returned to his steak. 'If I did do a thing that might warrant being tortured—which I shan't—I would make certain not to be caught. It's a moot point, anyway; we're only chatting, aren't we?'

Thanos, who studied international relations, had political aspirations, and a zeal for ensuring the cleanness of his record. He thought of his actions purely in terms of how they might appear to the people of the future Chitauri state; he cowered at the thought that some board of something or other would dig up a recording of that snipe about Asgard's petroleum regulations. Loki felt he did Thanos a service, inuring him to spitting at the image of the king.

Malekith had a more nebulous vision of the future. After having gone red with drink, he liked to wander the paths behind the playing fields, where the town edged into a light wood; he waved his hands, and said things like, 'I feel there's got to be someone to show the commoner men how things ought to be done,' which would earn him earnest nods from his devoteds. He was at St. Ives to study mathematics and language; when asked about his career, he gave a diffident mumble of, 'I might go into intelligence.'

'In Asgard, you mean,' Loki said.

'I haven't a choice,' Malekith said, 'have I.'

'Haven't you?'

On a warm August night, they sat together in Thanos' car, eating french fries and listening to the tinny music piped in to the lot of the drive-in: shake an apple off an apple tree, shake, shake sugar, but you'll never shake me, ah ah ah. Figures and faces moved in and out of light and shadow, glowing moonlight-bright in the beams of the headlights of Loki's guards, who idled fifty meters behind them. Malekith, absently smoking, resting his arm in the frame of the open window, said, 'You'll be tired of this, someday. I don't trust you not to want to run back into Papa's arms, again, once you've had your fill of playing at being an outcast.'

Loki laughed, bitterly, swallowing back the catch in his throat. He took a deep draw from his cigarette, and blew the smoke towards Malekith's face. 'I might,' he said. 'You will have to cross your fingers.'

 

* * *

 

His third year was gobbled up by nighttime wanderings with his band of outcasts. He took the train into the city less and less often; if it weren't for the maids, dust would have gathered on the bronzes and figurines in his apartment. He drank in town, in someone's rooms at Milton House, in the wood, and woke hungover to scribble his papers, or to bluff his way through tutorials. Always he felt crippled by the spear of his anger, which seemed to have lodged itself in his ribcage. A little bleeding, he felt, still, in his little dribblings of spite, his little spurtings of petulance, dirtying the white of his costume.

Letters from Odin stopped, after his visit. Letters from Thor and Frigga came, but piled up unread, tucked still-sealed in the pigeonholes of Loki's desk. The longer Loki went without reading them, the sicker he felt at a glimpse of the envelopes. He began to keep them in a lock-box under his bed.

One winter night, when all was empty and silent in snowfall, Loki climbed from his bed, quick-breathing, near bloodless with fright. He had dreamt of something horrible, and woke feeling he had turned up in another world. If he had gone to bed again, he would have shook the feeling off; but he had risen, so thrust the key into the lock, and tore the envelopes out of the box. He opened the window, and in the window's frame lighted a match and took the flame to the envelopes, till all that Thor had ever thought to say to him was curling blackened into the snow beneath his window. But that was only one night, and there were so many nights in a life.

 

* * *

 

Spring again: masses of honeysuckle clinging to the fences, birds snapping worms in their beaks, pollen clouding window-glass. It had been a year since Loki had last seen Odin, and three years since he had last seen Thor; largest in his vision was—yes, the speck—but beyond it the horizon, which he had drawn for himself, which he ran towards.

One fine morning, some time in April, Loki cut class, dismissed his guards till lunch, and walked through the wood which sat to the north of the town. The wood shook with noise; millions of cicadas clung to the trees, crying out to each other. Bird-whistles echoed in air sweet with soil-scent, damp with recent rain. Ducks and ducklings paddled through shallow streams; deer rustled through the underbrush, heard but rarely seen. He felt, for a moment—in such secrecy, with only the whole of the natural world as witness—that he wanted to build a home in the hollow of a tree, and live alone, for a time, only breathing.

He strolled, and clouds crept in. It happened so slowly that he did not see the sun draw back; but there was thunder, a faraway echo in the basin of the sky, as good as a shout to turn back. By the time he reached Milton House, a dense drizzle cooled the air. The last lagging students, with damp hair and the shoulders of their jumpers rain-dotted, held their satchels over their heads, hurrying towards wherever they were meant to be.

When Loki returned to his rooms, he saw that at the center of the table in his sitting room, now dim with rain-light, sat a small notecard. Thick, creamy paper, border of robin's egg blue. In black ink, this: _Greenhouse 11:30._

An Aesir guard stood at the entrance to the greenhouse. At the sight of him, Loki felt a lurch in his stomach, an instant numbness of body. His fingers clutched, white-knuckled, to the wooden handle of his umbrella. Taut near to snapping, he stood before the door, listening to the sound of the rain on the fabric of the umbrella, looking at the raindrops bead at the guard's leather shoes. He wondered how Odin dared presume that he would come trotting along, like a dog when called. Odin must have thought to show Loki his own subservience.

Thrusting his umbrella to the grass before the entrance, Loki motioned for the guard to step aside. He raised his chin, and pitched forward through the long, dim hall of the greenhouse. Thunder rattled the panes of glass; lightning flickered above, seeming liquid in the sheets of rain which sluiced down the sloping ceiling. Clouds of greenery, of tropical flowers, slipped fluidly past him, melting in the heat of his _damn him damn him damn him._

He thought of thrusting the blade of a trowel into Odin's gut, watching blood pool on the brick of the greenhouse path. Wasn't that the way his real father had died? Ignobly? He would kill the guard, and hide the two bodies in the hollow trees he had thought of living in. He would visit each day to watch the flies lay eggs and the maggots writhe—he swore to himself he would do it, flying white-hot and dizzied towards the center of the greenhouse, where shrouded in ferns and touching fingertip to the fall of a white iris stood Thor.

 

* * *

 

**part two**

Sudden stillness; the rain pouring against the glass. Somewhere there was a leak, whose dripping echoed. Thunder like cliffs collapsing in on themselves. Thor turned to look—eyes dark in the low light, hair fallen over shoulders, shoulders broader than last Loki saw. Loki felt the spear dislodge, and his wounds newly pouring. He took a step forward; Thor looked as if he had heard his pardon granted, and felt the steel of the axe lift from his neck.

What to say? Three years of longing bled from the puncture unstopped; meanwhile Thor like the pardoned, breathing air sweet for being air he would not otherwise have breathed. Thor took Loki's hands in his; Loki felt his fingers curl in the heat of Thor's palm. Those were the hands that had touched the iris.

'Why have you come?' Loki asked.

'My course at Idavoll ended last month. I told Father that I would see you, now that I am free. He couldn't have barred me from it.'

Yes, the course at the academy. Thor's face was wind-chafed; his palms were rough with calluses. Loki had missed the last parade. He thought of Thor in dress uniform, clean blue wool, silk sash, hair knotted at the side of the head; all of the thousands of caps flying into the air, and the boom of ceremonial cannons. Meanwhile he had been burning letters.

He said, 'Don't you dare tell me that you've forgiven me.'

Thor's smile spread. It was so beastly merciful a smile that Loki felt himself a child, again, a child who had made his older brother proud, and who, having done so, could be happy without reserve, for ever and ever. Then he was clutched in Thor's arms; he breathed the scent of Thor's hair, soap, rainfall, the damp air of the greenhouse.

Thor was living against him: chest rising, hands clasping, weight shifting from foot to foot. Within him a heart beating, lungs, veins, nerves, tendon and liver and guts—but a thinking being! Thor, his brother! Thor, who had a soul, who with his soul chose Loki to love, though Loki had not earned it. Thor, with his face against the side of Loki's face, threaded his fingers in Loki's hair, winding the locks round his knuckles.

'What would you have me refuse to forgive you for?' Thor asked.

'For being the worm in the fruit. How much fuller a man you would be if I'd not been your brother.'

'I am as full a man,' Thor said, 'as any man could hope to be.'

'You damned liar.' Loki swept his fingers into the mass of Thor's hair; he twisted and pulled. 'I had rotted you.'

Thor put his hands at Loki's shoulders; he drew back from Loki, and looked him in the eye. Tears in his eyes. He said, 'I'll not have you strike yourself on my behalf. I will hold you. I will listen to you speak to me, if it is kind.'

'Then you will not listen to me speak?'

'You have kindness in you yet—Loki.'

The space between 'yet' and 'Loki' was like a pinch of the starlit sky: less than nothing, but inside of it, so many thousands of regrets, half-thoughts, memories, longings, unstoppable impulses to curl the lips in towards the first sound of _brother._ Thor had checked himself. It was the crossing-out of the word in his letters. He let his hands slip from Loki's shoulders. When still, when looking at Loki without touching him, he seemed to swell to bursting; so Loki took Thor's hand and held it to his cheek.

 

* * *

 

'You've cut your hair,' Thor said, when they sat together in the back of his car, center in the procession of the royal convoy. With their little Aesir flags a-waving, they were journeying to the city, for Thor had wanted to see it. Loki suspected that it mattered very little where they were; they seemed to be floating together in nothingness, seeing only each other, alight with the feeling of proximity. It was as if the air around them sparkled.

Loki reached his hand up to where his hair curled over his nape; he played his fingers through the soft, short locks, thinking of how Thor had liked to sweep his long hair back just to touch that stretch of skin. He wondered if he wasn't unearthing something better buried: the heart from under the floorboards. He wondered, too, if Thor thought of touching him. He gave his hair a final stroke-through, and let his hand drop.

'You've grown yours out,' he told Thor.

'It's required, for a warrior, isn't it? One doesn't like to think of an officer without his hair.'

'Oh, yes, an officer. One doesn't like to think of a king without his hair, either.'

'There's time yet,' Thor said. 'I shall have many a year in which to be an officer.'

'One never knows about time.'

'Is that what they've taught you at university? To keep short hair, and withhold judgment on time?'

Thor seemed not to be able to stop looking at Loki, who saw this only because he could not stop looking at Thor. If he happened to glance towards the window, he found his eyes drawn back, nagged by the feeling of having seen Thor just a touch altered from memory. Thor was stronger, taller; his jaw was squarer, his bearing straighter, his hair indeed longer.

Looking at him, Loki felt bereft. For eighteen years he had watched Thor melt from little-boyhood to middle-boyhood to beyond-boyhood. With his leaving, he had struck in a black spot, from which Thor emerged distinctly different. Loki would never know what it was to watch those three years' worth of days piling up, changing the face, the body, and the soul on the scale of atoms. … Thor had been at the academy, anyway. They would always have parted.

'I cut it,' Loki said, 'the month I came to the city. It was so damned hot I couldn't bear having it long. Then I was used to the feeling of air on my neck, and summer comes round every year.'

'It suits a part of you,' Thor told him. 'When it is long, it suits another part of you.'

'You must have taken ages to think that up,' Loki murmured. He leaned his head against Thor's shoulder, so that they would not have to look at each other, and see each other different.

 

* * *

 

In the city they walked like new lovers: keeping abreast, turning their heads to catch a peek at each other, bashfully glancing away. The rain had thinned to a mist, through which the city seemed closed-in and intimate; the puddles in the streets, the lights of the shopfronts, the bobbing umbrellas, were trinkets which had been dropped down to amuse them. They walked along the eastern edge of Central Park, where greenery hung over the low stone wall of the park; to the east, white buildings elegantly sprouted. Thor peered, smiling, into the faces of passerby, as if they were all some alien race he was desperate to befriend.

'Like rabbits, aren't they?' Thor breathed into the mist, raising his face towards the tops of the buildings. 'Like thousands of rabbits, hopping about and sniffing out carrots. God, I've missed seeing the world.'

Thor liked to see the people who sold roasted chestnuts at the entrances to the park, the people who sold framed reproductions near the front of the Met, the people who walked shrouded in shopping bags from the department stores, the people who sailed through doors held open by doormen in long brass-buttoned overcoats. He looked in on them as if they were the fishers and hunters of northeastern Asgard, or the bakers and butchers and shop-owners of the sunny southern towns; as if these people, these subjects of another realm, could live off of the warmth of his benevolence.

He pulled Loki into pâtisseries and boutiques and art galleries, and said, 'Let's have that, and that, and that,' and Loki thought of the way a starving man might gorge himself, spitting and slobbering and pressing bread into his grin-split mouth. It hadn't been ten days since Thor was waking at dawn to the sound of reveille, choking down porridge in the mess hall, standing stiff-spined through formation and inspection. Now, he looted New York of so much that at intervals he had to send one of his men off to deposit the spoils in Loki's apartment, to which he had invited himself. When the sun began to set, and his stomach to grumble, he sent someone to coerce a reservation for a table for two out of Le Mot Juste.

'We'll feast,' he said, because he could not imagine a world in which he was told that reservations had got to be scheduled a month in advance.

 

* * *

 

The rain began again not long after the sun had set. Thor and Loki retreated to Loki's apartment, ostensibly to dress for dinner, but chiefly to be alone together. Thor wandered through Loki's rooms, wreaking havoc: rubbing his fingers over the antique bronze, tugging at the clothing strewn across the sofas, rifling through the stacks of back-issues of the _Philosophical Review,_ leaving them out of order.

Thor's looking sullied the sanctity of the world Loki had made for himself. Those were the things Loki had got for himself, according to his own terms, for the most part; now they were only things Thor compared to his own. 'There's a picture by that fellow who's done the ones at the National Gallery,' Thor said, and 'It's just like the figure in the library in the lodge! I always thought that that was pretty.'

Loki lighted the charcoal in the samovar anyway. As the water heated, he hefted himself up to sit on the edge of the table, hands folded between his legs. Thor wandered the perimeter of the sitting room, stopping for a moment to peer from the picture window. The glass was beaded with rain; now and then the sky bloomed blue with cloudy lightning.

'Will you stay in New York?' Thor asked, looking over his shoulder towards Loki.

'Does it matter?' Loki leaned back, pressing his palms to the oak of the table. 'Is that why you're here, because _he_ wants you to tell him whether he ought to consider me lost?'

Thor sighed; he ran his fingers through his hair, and rested his palms against his forehead, for a moment. Then he turned towards Loki, and came near him. His footsteps creaked in the hardwood.

'I do nothing on his behalf. I suppose you think I am like a limb of his, that all I do, I do according to his will. If you do think so, you're stupid as you think I am.' A step nearer. 'I've made an ass of myself, in Asgard. At Idavoll there was a boy who had been falsely accused of rule-breaking, and a false witness brought forth as proof. There wasn't a hair of real evidence against him, but General Solberg expelled him. … —I staged a sort of a coup.'

Loki's mouth quivered into a wicked smile. How like Thor to trip himself in the name of justice. He wished he could have been there to goad him on. Why not look into General Solberg's files, eh, Thor? See if there's anything he ought to be expelled for? Surely a picture or two might wander into his desk drawer? Loki felt cheated of the fun of it.

Thor grimaced. 'Father might have had my hide, if Mother hadn't put a word in on my behalf. I might have been expelled, if Mother hadn't strong-armed General Solberg. Father wanted to let me learn from my shame. He told me that he thought I ought to have learnt better. He told me that there wasn't an excuse, then, because you weren't there to tug me along into mischief. Well, I was rash, and told him something I ought not to have told him.'

'Are you really so quick to defend me, even now that you know me? I did tug you into mischief, and you did ought to have learnt better.'

Thor placed a hand on Loki's shoulder. Loki shrugged it away, only for Thor to replace it—to slide his hand up to his neck, where Loki felt his pulse leap up towards Thor's palm. He tilted his head to the side, so that his neck was bared up to the full expanse of Thor's hand. Thor let the tips of his fingers push into the thick thatch of hair at the nape of Loki's neck.

'Well,' Thor said, 'you have got me into trouble, even from six thousand kilometers away. If I hadn't had to fight for your honor, I could have grovelled to Father, and likely appeased him. I could have come to New York to shout at you.'

'Your father must be frightened,' Loki said. 'Frightened that you would defend the honor of a lying, cheating, spiteful, ungrateful, filthy little half-breed. He's just now realizing how monumentally stupid it was to put the adder in the cradle of his only son.'

Thor's hand tensed against Loki's neck, then dropped. Loki righted his head and stared, deadened, into Thor's face, where Thor's brow furrowed, his mouth thinned. Thor had, in such moments, more of a resemblance to Frigga than to Odin—only Frigga's broad, definite features, Frigga's way of putting her mind through the muscles of her face, could ever convey such a plunge of the insides.

'I wish you had stayed in Asgard,' Thor said, 'that you might have spoken to us, and spoken through your sadness. But you went. … That we loathe you, that you aren't my brother, that our father isn't your father—they are all lies you wilfully believe. Why do you believe them?'

'Funny that you think I lie, now. I did lie to myself, for eighteen years; it was only that I didn't know I was lying.'

'When you looked at our mother, and thought, _That is my mother,_ you were not lying. When you looked at me, and thought, _That is my brother,_ you were not lying. —You were raised among us; you are as Aesir as I.'

'Thor, for heaven's sake.' Loki closed his eyes; he listened, for a moment, to the sound of the rain, and the echoes of their breathing in the room. The creaking of the floor beneath Thor's shifting weight. He opened his eyes, again, so that he might see Thor's face. 'I don't want you to tell me that I was always Aesir, or that I was always your father's son. It isn't true. I don't want you to convince me that it is true.'

'But it is plain as day that it is true.'

'Look at me, Thor. Look at me.' Loki, taking his hands from the table, leaned forward; he put his hands to the side of Thor's face, holding him in place, forcing him to look. 'I am Jotun. A blind man could tell you that I am Jotun. We may share blood; but I am not the thing you thought I was. I shouldn't like you to think me what I'm not.'

It hurt Thor more than Loki had expected. Thor's brow contorted, his nostrils flared, the vein pulsed in his neck; it would all seem anger, if not for that dizzying deepness of the gaze. He shook his head, so that Loki's hands fell away; then, instantly bereft, he leaned into Loki, and clasped Loki's head to his chest. He was warm, musky from the exertion of walking. He wore no scent. The side of Loki's face scratched against the fabric of his button-front.

'If you mean someone for whom I care deeply,' Thor said, 'then you are the thing I thought you were.'

Thor's hips, now that he stood directly before Loki, rested solidly between the spread of Loki's thighs. Alongside the surge of power, cool and heavy through his spine, fluttered a tickling arousal. Being so near to Thor reminded him of how they had been near to each other before. Thor, still clasping Loki to him, fairly shook with earnest love; Loki felt a slow crawl of flush towards his cock.

Thor remembered himself. Reddened, he let Loki loose, mostly—he kept a hand at the side of Loki's head, where in the past he might have combed his fingers through longer curls. He peered expectantly into Loki's face, mouth in a press of frustration, waiting for Loki to say that it was all right, that he knew Thor loved him, and Thor was his brother, and Odin and Frigga his father and mother. Loki looked up at him with as clear and open a face as he could muster; clear and open as a bowl of fresh water.

'I know what I am,' he said.

Thor stroked his hand over the side of Loki's face. He cupped his cheek in his palm, and rubbed a blunt thumb against his cheekbone. It was the gesture of a lover, unmistakably. Thor saw only belatedly that he had shown himself. So they faced each other, seeing. Lightning through the picture window, though no thunder under traffic-noise. Loki wanted Thor to hit him till his eyes were black, his lip split, his nose snapped, his face swollen. Or else kiss him gently. The lamplight flickered in a second's drop of power.

Would they, again? After the putting-away of all childish things, an again? Loki's pulse beat in his head. He felt, with a searing of commencement like an arrow to the gut, that Thor brushed his thumb across his bottom lip. He opened his mouth and nipped at the flesh of Thor's thumb-tip.

Thor's hand shuddered. His mouth was open, too, as if mirroring. Loki could feel his heartbeat in his thumb.

'It will be real,' Loki said, 'this time.'

'It always had been real.' Thor was chiding, as if Loki was the one who had been foolish.

Thor bent down to touch his mouth to Loki's mouth; he slid his fingers through Loki's hair, and pulled Loki's head back till his jaw slackened, his lips parted. They kissed slowly, inartfully, open-mouthed and wet; Thor licked his tongue at Loki's mouth, and Loki sucked Thor's lip between his lips. It felt as if all that was tender and responsive in Loki had been pulled up to his mouth, so that when the flat of Thor's tongue slicked against his own, it was a prodding at a place of pleasure so raw and essential that Loki was panting, toes curling, helpless. He felt he would spend at the gentlest touch.

He put his hand to Thor's wrist, the wrist of the hand that held tight at his hair, and whispered, against the side of Thor's mouth, 'Stop.'

Thor drew back, spots of red high and hectic in his cheeks. He was leaning forward, a bull at the gate, waiting to leap into another kiss.

'Not yet,' Loki said. 'I want a while.'

The storm was so upon them, then, that definite lines of lightning webbed across the sky, instantaneous, there and then gone again. The rain fell thickly; the shouts and car-horns and engine-rumblings of the street below were muffled in the wash of it. Behind Loki, the samovar was bubbling. He stood; with his cock pained-stiff in his trousers, and his hands shaking convulsively, he prepared a pot of tea.

 

* * *

 

He woke not long after dawn, thinking that his apartment smelt different to his rooms at St. Ives. Cleaner, and more his own. Clean-smelling too was the cool air through the window, which he had cracked open before sleeping. Rain was falling, and had puddled on the sill, chilly enough that his fingers went numb when he swirled his fingertips in it. Through the wall that separated his bedroom from the guest room, Thor's snoring rumbled.

After they had had their cups of tea, the evening before, they had gone out to a near-silent dinner, for Thor had got his table at Le Mot Juste. He gulped down wine, and Loki, who in calmer circumstances could scoop up a banquet with a flick of his tongue, sat staring at the succession of plates. When they returned to the apartment they felt at once how enormously tired they were. They went off to their separate rooms. Loki had been too tired, too drained of feeling, even to rub himself off. He did not know if Thor had.

But here was a day apart from the day before. Loki felt as he had felt the night he first touched Thor: as if he were pulled on a string by implacable fate. He was tired of longing; he was done with it; Thor was there. To see him again, to kiss him again, would feel as good as sauna after ice-swimming. Loki padded barefoot into the guest room, where he climbed beneath the eiderdown, kissed sleeping Thor on the shoulder, and waited.

'Hullo,' Thor said, when he woke. His voice was throaty with sleep; he wrinkled the linen in his turning, stretching, yawning. When he settled into the world, and found his wits about him, he looked at Loki with an open, unpretending longing. He swept his fingers through Loki's hair, which had gone curly with sleep, and murmured, 'You're untidy.'

'This makes me think of being small,' Loki said. 'Doesn't it remind you of sleeping together in the winter, when ten quilts weren't enough to keep warm?'

'I would complain that your hands were cold. Your hands _are_ cold.'

'You're a furnace. I can't be near you without sweating.'

'Can't you?' Thor, face split with smiling—there were smile-lines forming around his mouth—put his hands at Loki's waist and pulled him against him, holding him near to his heat. 'I'll make you suffer with it, then.'

Loki, twining his legs with Thor's, touched a dry kiss to the side of Thor's mouth; he crept his fingertips beneath the fall of hair that covered the back of Thor's neck, and pulled Thor forward to kiss thoroughly.

'I'm not suffering,' he said, when he had broken the kiss; but Thor was nudging his mouth along the line of his jaw, the slope of his neck, breathing gooseflesh into his skin. Thor kissed his neck as if he meant to lick up the scent of him: probably linen-starch, and lavender from his pillow-sachet.

'You smell different,' Thor said, seeming to wonder at it. 'You used not to smell any different to me. And'—reaching a hand beneath the eiderdown, smoothing his palm along the curve of Loki's hip, stark beneath his jumper—'you're thinner. And just a touch taller. Or am I imagining?'

'By five centimeters,' Loki said.

'Still not taller than me.' Thor sat up, drawing back the eiderdown. Kneeling next to Loki, he considered the line of Loki's body. The halo of his golden hair, uncombed and free-flying, fell into relief against the blue light of the window. With a wrinkling of fondness about his eyes, and a stroke to the side of Loki's chest, he said, 'I've missed looking at you.'

'And touching me.'

'Touching you too.' Thor's face had eased into a quiet equilibrium of feeling; some sadness seemed to have gone into him, alongside the joy. He took Loki's hand in his, and lifted it to kiss, like a storybook prince. Softly, he said, 'I will let you alone. If you wish to be let alone.'

Loki, with his hand limp in Thor's, felt a pouring of ice through his stomach. His face must have fallen, for Thor's face fell, too. He felt as if his costume were ripping away, and those sores of longing bared up to Thor, who saw them; and Thor wanted only to kiss his hand, and hold his palm, however cold, against the warmth of his flushed cheek.

So he laughed. He said, stroking his fingers along Thor's face, feeling out the prickle of his nascent beard, 'I do want you to let me alone, later. You could hardly be my shadow at St. Ives. You've things of your own to do in Asgard, and I've things of my own to do here. … But not yet. We ought to be together for a bit. Long enough anyway to have a little fun.'

'I want to be together for longer than a bit.'

'And I want—' Anger stung in his throat; he was very near to telling Thor, _And I wanted to be who I thought I was, but so it goes._ He kept his smile, the cruel little mouth-twist which Thor seemed always to mistake for a beam, and said, 'I want you to come here, and kiss me.'

As Thor settled himself on top of him, diving into a kiss, Loki rubbed his hands down Thor's sides, feeling out the hard inwards slope of his waist. He felt Thor's cock, thick through the fabric of their pyjamas, and sighed against Thor's mouth, giving the gentlest upwards hip-rocking.

It felt—this warmth of Thor's body, the cleanness of the linen, the sound of the rain against the windows—like the sort of dream that Loki hated most: the kind in which he was happy, unwillingly, in a vile mockery of all his waking pain. He wanted to shove Thor off of the bed, and make him grovel to be let in again; but Thor was divesting him of his pyjamas, and his skin was tightening against the chill, and Thor was rubbing his hands over him, touching him generously, to warm him. Thor kissed his neck, and collar, and shoulders.

Then Thor sat back, so that he knelt between Loki's spread legs; he curved his palms at Loki's thighs, pressing divots into the softness of flesh, there. He skimmed his fingers through the black curls about Loki's cock, trailing upwards to his navel; he teased at his cock without gratifying.

'You're different everywhere,' he said, to a snort and an eye-roll from Loki.

'You went to Idavoll thick-set and came back like the Belvedere Torso.'

'Without a head, you mean?'

'You've never had one of those.'

'Pardon me!' But Thor said it smilingly. He feathered his fingers across the soft spread of Loki's stomach till Loki was convulsing with ticklishness, curling his toes, biting his lip and whimpering to keep from laughing. Loki scratched his nails at Thor's forearms until Thor, to distract him, wrapped his fingers round his shaft, drawing down the foreskin to peer at the bright, warm pink of his cock. Loki fell quiet; he released his sore lip, and lifted his hips so that his cock pressed into Thor's fist. At the wash of feeling he sighed.

None of the people he had ever slept with had seemed so happy to look, and to touch, without greed for their own pleasure. Thor seemed really to want to hear the sounds Loki made as he stroked his cock; he seemed really to want to look into Loki's face, to see the flush in his cheeks as he pet at his balls, rubbing tenderly. It made Loki feel worshipped, that singular attentiveness. Worship, certainly, was Thor lifting one of Loki's legs to curl up against his chest, cupping one of his feet in his two hands, and kissing at his toes. When Thor sucked his little toe into the warmth of his mouth, Loki made the smallest, most broken noise, like a last gasp.

Loki saw for the first time something like deviousness in Thor. Those kind, soft brows narrowed into a frown, though his eyes smiled, and he said, knowing full well he hadn't, 'I haven't hurt you? I had better let you go.'

Patiently, Thor waited for Loki to squirm; he waited for Loki to frown, and sigh, and say at last, 'I'll kick you in the nose, and break it.'

'Fair Loki, your tongue makes distance from your deed.' With one hand holding his foot, palm as pedestal, he reached to Loki's cock, and with steady flicks of his wrist had him panting.

'I can kick you in the nose while I've got a stiff prick.' A long performance of a sigh, a shrugging of the shoulders, and he looked to the ceiling and said, 'But I'd rather do it when I've got a spent prick, so I'll spare you. … Thor, do it again.'

It was almost pathetic how quick Thor was to bend to Loki's demand. Loki had only to tell him to do it, and there he was, tugging at his cock, licking his tongue at the soft, sensitive undersides of his smaller toes. Really pathetic was Loki's pleasure at it: 'Oh, heavens,' he said, with stars of pleasure needling through his skin, flickering up from his toes to his thigh to his cock, drawing up the blood in him. He sighed and shifted, and gulped down breaths, giving helpless _ah_ s on each exhalation; when he looked to Thor he knew that Thor saw straight to his pitiful parts.

It was like having his skin flung open, or like staring into bright lights: too much, this, too much sensation, feeling, too much being seen for what he was. Too much of the blue in Thor's eyes, too much of the wet of Thor's tongue, too much of the sweat on Thor's palm. Too thick the rain, too soft the bed, too aching his cock, too plunging his heart.

He curled his hand over the hand of Thor's that wrapped at his cock, and so urged Thor to bring him off quicker, harder. He rocked his hips up and flung his head back and groaned, loudly and regularly, till all his pleasure gathered at his gut and he could let himself tip from the precipice of finishing. Only falling, then, gently and without effort. He held himself still, so as not to kick Thor in the teeth with careless thrashing, and it seemed to bring his feeling to the fore; he could do nothing but let his finish seize through him, tremble outwards to his cheeks and fingers, chest and thighs, spill against his stomach and his hand and Thor's hand all. Thor gave a plain kiss to the tips of his toes, and released him.

He could hardly bear to look at Thor. With a wild hotness to his cheeks, he forced himself: he caught Thor's gaze, and held it till Thor seemed to freeze beneath it. He pulled himself up, pushed Thor back against the headboard, and tugged away his pyjamas. Once Thor was naked—how golden Thor's skin was, how shockingly soft—he lay on his front, settling with his head between Thor's legs. He put his hands at Thor's hips, and stared up at him.

'It's very early still,' he told Thor, breathing against the red curve of his cock. 'I could sleep for two or three hours yet. It is exhausting, spending first thing. Makes one idle for the rest of the day. I might turn in, again.'

'If you meant to turn in,' Thor said, 'you would have put your head on the pillow, and shut your eyes, and made to sleep. I know you yet'—ah, there again the agonizing space in which he wanted to say _brother_ —'Loki.'

'I am putting my head on the pillow.' He lay his head at Thor's hip, face near to the warmth of his cock, and closed his eyes. Probably Thor did not see the tremor of his smile. 'Goodnight, Thor.'

Presently he felt Thor's hand cupping his skull, Thor's fingers threading through his hair. What began as a gentle touch eased slowly into something guiding, insisting. Thor was pulling his head up, tugging him clumsily nearer his cock.

Loki gave his dry, dark _ah-heh_ of a laugh, and opened his eyes to smile up at Thor. 'What's this,' he said. 'You'd rather I not sleep. Too impatient to spend? … I _dare_ you to force me to suck your cock. Let it be a test of your mettle.'

'I don't know what sort of mettle I would show if I did,' Thor said; but he kept still his grip at Loki's hair, kept still Loki's head hovering near enough to his cock that his breath fanned over it. 'I should say it would be a show of mettle to let you deny me.'

'Then away with the mettle. Let's see you take what you like.'

Clever Thor had caught on to his play. There was a twitch at the corner of Thor's mouth, a new clearness to his eyes. A slight hesitation—then he scraped his nails along Loki's scalp, and jerked at his hair till his mouth slicked inelegantly across his shaft. Pain seared through Loki's scalp, real enough that he gasped; still he had to work to flatten his smile. When Thor gave a second, warning yank to his hair, he wrapped a hand round the base of Thor's cock and mouthed wetly at the head, lapping his tongue over the slick curve of it.

Thor made a noise like a man who had seen the final treasure of the universe. Loki hummed with a sly satisfaction; he drew back Thor's foreskin and licked resolutely at the underside of his shaft, sometimes suckling at his head to clean it of the fluid that beaded there. Thor, by the tenor of his groans, and the hard gasping of his breath, seemed pretty near to spending; Loki slid Thor's cock between his lips and sucked, quick and fervent, till by the final tightening of Thor's clutch he knew to draw back. With his fingers still tugging along Thor's shaft, he looked up to see Thor's cheeks glowing pink, his eyes shut in desperation.

'Look at me,' Loki said.

Thor looked. He would have seen the spit-wet jut of his own cock, shining in the grip of Loki's fist; behind it, Loki's face, cool white, supercilious, unmoved by the splatter of spend thick across his mouth and cheek. After Thor had finished, Loki bent down to lick away the last dribble at the head of his cock, then crawled up the spread of his body.

'How do I look?' he asked Thor, who was limp and panting, glassy-eyed.

Thor seemed to have to work to take stock of Loki's looks. When he did, he frowned, and raised a hand towards Loki's cheek, whereupon Loki slapped his hand away. They were nearly nose-to-nose; so close, Loki could see the peeling of Thor's skin from wind, the pale grass of stubble across his jaw and upper lip, the flare of his nostrils in rough breathing. Probably all that Thor saw was his own spend on Loki's face.

'If you don't like to see it,' Loki said, 'lick it up.'

Loki didn't expect it, but Thor did: he leaned forward, and with a tired fluttering of the lashes, gave a series of long kisses to Loki's cheek, smearing the spend more than cleaning it. He licked affectionately at the crease of Loki's lips, at which Loki could do little but open his mouth and allow him. They kissed slowly, in that certain way they kissed only after having spent; and when their mouths were raw with kissing, Loki leaned his forehead for a moment against Thor's shoulder.

He smiled, privately. He pressed a kiss to Thor's collar, and went to wash his face.

 

* * *

 

That day moved in childhood-time, in which each hour was an age, possessed of its own purpose and its own climate. Eight to nine, which they dozed through, was the age of budding movement—not of their own, but of the world without, of subway rattling and queues for the coffee carts. Nine to ten was the age of drowsy turnings-over and peeks at the clock, and of rejoicing at their having been spared the churning of an adult day. Ten to eleven was the hour of hunger. They sent one of Thor's people to buy fruit from the market; it was early, yet, for fruits like peaches and blackberries and plums, and so they ate apples and pears. They slung dressing gowns over their shoulders and reclined in the mess of linen atop the bed of the guest room, chewing lazily at their apple or pear, watching the rain at the window.

They talked a little, in quiet voices. Loki told Thor of St. Ives, and Thor told Loki of Idavoll. At times they would lapse into a game of remember-when. Their memories seemed always to differ: Loki would say, 'We did get him out onto the roof, but you had the poker and I the candlestick,' and Thor would say, 'No, you must have had the poker; I can remember you breaking the windowpane with it.' They settled their differences by saying, together, 'Well, it was funny. Yes, it was funny enough.'

Memories of the little nothings of childhood—pokers and candlesticks, snow and cold water, strawberries and grass—gave way to more solemn recollection. What had long ago seemed inexplicable had, now, a terrible clarity. Why had Frigga shied away from speaking of her family? Why was there always such silence after someone had said, 'Those two look so different to each other'? They knew.

'Now I see,' Loki said, 'why I was never asked to play polo in Vanaheim.'

'Father only took me away because he didn't trust me to learn on my own.' Thor gave a pensive crunch to his apple. Through his chewing and swallowing, he said, 'Half our trips he spent asking why I couldn't be more thoughtful, or if I ever intended to really try to understand the world. It was well and good for a prince to ride horses and drink claret, but—'

'What of a king, yes.' In a mockery of a stage-voice: 'The king loves not revelry and wine! The king loves not that which might bring him joy, for joy deceives the king, and the king loves not deceit, save when it suits him to deceive. The king does love the barren arbor, for his tongue taste not its fruit.'

'But here we are,' Thor said, brandishing the core of his apple. He tossed it to the floor, and leaned in to taste the fruit of Loki's neck.

Kissing, for a time, to the sound of the soft rain. They meant to give each other three years' worth of kisses in the span of one morning. They kissed cruelly and hungrily, and gently and sweetly; one kissed another's wrist, or his palm, or the inside of his elbow, or the space behind his ear. If one of them stood to stretch his legs or to fetch something, the other would sneak a peck to his back, or drag him into a long, messy mockery of a last-farewell kiss. Thor, when he pressed his lips to Loki's chest, mumbled something incomprehensible into his skin, seeming to bypass Loki's mind and speak directly into his heart.

The pain of it was fathoms deeper than any solitary longing. Loki felt as if his soul had manifested as an organ in his chest, strong and superfluous, draining blood from all around it; he felt, with Thor kissing down the center of his chest, that this new organ forced itself like liquid through his ribcage, tearing and spilling, wetting Thor in poison.

Trembling, Loki pulled Thor up, and let Thor's face rest in the curve of his neck. With his arms around Thor's chest, and his chin at Thor's shoulder, he held fast. He looked up at the ceiling, and pleaded the light there to spare him from the ignominy of love.

 

* * *

 

In the dim grey of the afternoon, Loki read. Some time in the turning hour—twelve to one—he had padded into his sitting room, and brought a small pile of books into the guest room. Thor had thumbed through all of them, and declared them dull as dust, so sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed and watched Loki skim through a popular novel.

The novel was something about a man and a woman and a yellow car; these things flung themselves through their tiny tragedy more or less unacknowledged by the man who turned the pages. He was thinking of a time, perhaps past or perhaps future, in which he could not touch his brother. (When had he begun to think of Thor as his brother, again? When he had had Thor's cock in his mouth?) The fear of not-touching, the sting of the recollection of it, jittered through his fingers and toes; so he let his book drop to his chest, and said to Thor, 'Do you want to fuck me?'

Thor swallowed visibly; the apple of his throat leapt up to his chin, and sunk down again. 'Do you mean with my prick?'

'Good lord, why would you think that? No, with your knee.'

'I only mean, have you done it, ever before?'

Loki laughed so deeply that the book on his chest juddered. He raised the back of his hand to his mouth in an attempt to stifle himself; the attempt only had him laugh for longer. 'Yes,' he said, struggling towards seriousness. 'Times upon times upon times.'

'Who with?' He was so earnestly curious that Loki tumbled again into laughter. Thor was only frowning, leaning forwards in anticipation of hearing the answer.

'Well, I don't know, who is anyone fucked by. Men, mostly. People who like to put their pricks in places. It's rather a common urge; one doesn't ask who might drink a cup of wine.'

'Are they gentle with you?'

Loki smiled, wryly, though a chill had stolen through him, and drawn down the corners of his eyes. He put his book at his side, and sat up to face Thor. Taking his hands in Thor's, he said, 'Cross my heart, I would never have a man hurt me.'

Except for the man who had liked to slap Loki's face till his cheeks ached, or the man who liked Loki to gag on his cock, or the man who had liked to put things inside of Loki; but Loki had liked it all, too, and besides did not wish to tell Thor, whose fallen face made him regret having done any of it.

'I ought to have been here to look after you. You are'—hesitation; then a hardening of the face, a determination—'my little brother, Loki, damn you and damn what you think, you are my damned senseless, damned stupid little brother, I would not have you hurt, and I swear by our mother's eyes I would see the graves of those who hurt you.'

Loki felt a catch in his throat like a glass-shard swallowed. He wanted to kiss Thor's neck, or rub at his cock, or whisper something filthy, just to stop him from saying anything so pure; yet he was dumb, holding a shiver in his chest and his hands in Thor's hands. That was what he had forgotten he loathed—his own frailty against Thor's damned beatitude.

'Do you want to have me, or not?' he asked.

'—If you will have me have you.'

Loki looked at Thor's mouth, and saw the parting of lips as he told him, 'I will.'

For a while longer—midday was giving over to early afternoon, in which one could see evening standing at the end of the hall of the day, waiting—they kissed. They had begun to kiss in the way of parting lovers: deeply, lingeringly, as though they had got to tear their pleasure out of time. It was the last bite of the last shrivelled leavings of the lake-leaping days, the strawberry days, the make-believe days. Loki had said, 'We'll stay here for a few days longer,' but they were having each other now; afterwards they would not be children, or even young men exactly, in the way that other young men were.

Leaves of grass, thought Loki, as he lay on his side, talking Thor through wetting his fingers in lotion and giving his first tentative strokes to his hole. The little world they kept to themselves, as brothers, was growing in places, fading in places, but in essence it was constant: verdant, a field of wild poppies in bloom. One blossom, one leaf, then another, then another, and Loki was saying, 'Yes, it's all right, press two fingers in, any two, just—'

'But they aren't—'

'Because you aren't— _oh_. Oh, there we are, oh.'

Thor, who was curled along Loki's back, breathed against his shoulder; at each thrust of Thor's fingers Loki felt a hot wash of breath along his skin, sometimes a pass of Thor's mouth as he rocked forwards. Loki felt drawn back against Thor by the heat of his body, solid and assuredly there. If he reached his hand back to clutch at Thor's hip, Thor's hip was there; if he curved his leg back, his heel would press at Thor's calf, and Thor's calf was there. If he rolled his hips back to feel Thor's fingers fill him—

He wished that they had done this ages ago. He wished that they had been doing it for the last three years. He said, rocking back against Thor's hand, 'I want you to do this to me for the next century.'

'I will,' Thor said, snapping his wrist upwards in a bolt of a thrust of the fingers, hard enough that Loki cried out at the sudden fill of it. 'I will hold you here—for an age. I will fuck you for as long as you will have me. The next century. Thousands of years.'

'Oh, but I—wouldn't be pleased with—just this, for thousands of years. You would have to be—mm, you would have to be inventive, and I don't trust you to be inventive. How many ways—oh—how many ways do you think—you could make me spend, Thor, in a thousand years? You would exhaust your filthiest fantasies in a fortnight of fucking, never mind a month, or—ah.'

'You sound'—Thor was breathing hotly against his ear, now—'pretty well pleased with me, at present.'

'I wouldn't say so. I might be pleased,' he said, forcing a low laugh, 'if you fucked me. Let's see you try your hand at it. Well, that comes later. Try your prick at it, as it were.'

Thor, now that he had found what he could do to Loki, didn't like to go on so quickly. He pressed himself up against Loki's back, and buried his fingers in him to the last knuckle, so harshly and unexpectedly that Loki elongated, arching up, tilting back his head, curling down his feet. Loki, letting loose a slow breath, stilling to feel the full stretch of Thor's fingers, wondered whether he would have believed it, if ten years ago he had been told he would do this, one day. It seemed at once his sole, inevitable fate, and an accidental tripping-off of the edge of the proper world. Thor made a soft sound against his shoulder; Loki thought, _That is Thor,_ and shivered from scalp to toes.

'I'm damned pleased you're here,' he breathed.

Thor told him, 'I could hardly be anywhere else.'

In time they drew themselves up, and rearranged: Thor knelt at the center of the bed, the linen in disarray around him, and Loki climbed onto his lap, splitting the golden-brown of Thor's body with the pale spread of his thighs. He let Thor coat his hand in lotion and reach around his back to wet his arsehole, messily and thoroughly; he rested his hands atop Thor's head, combing his fingers through Thor's pillow-tangles, sighing with the low thrum of being slicked up to be fucked.

'Is this not enough,' Thor said, giving a demanding press of fingers.

Loki laughed at him, and raised himself just enough to have Thor's hand slipping down his thigh. Leaning forwards against Thor, the underside of his cock touching to Thor's stomach, he said, 'Nothing is ever enough. But. Just'—slipping down, again, so that Thor could easily touch him—'a little while longer. And then we'll—mm, well.'

So many times he had done this, but never quite satisfactorily; it was always a little too something, or not something enough. Even when his body had sung with stimulation his mind had floated outwards, into the realm of the what-he-ought-to-have-dones and the what-he-had-dones and the what-he-would-dos. Now—Thor was parting his arse with a wide palm, leading his cock to his hole, letting the fat crown of it press against him without yet pressing into him—he stopped to think of anything else at all. He did not wonder who he was, or why he was there; he knew. He was Loki, of nowhere; Loki, of no one, but somehow still brother of Thor. Most importantly Loki, the man who was fated to do nothing but tilt Thor's head up to kiss him, and hum at the softness of Thor's lips.

He sunk down onto Thor's cock, and Thor lifted his hips to fuck him, and he thought, with that sudden, incredible heat of the joining of their bodies, that it was all right: he had understood the world. He did, then, want to do this for a thousand years. He wanted to stay with his thighs pressing against Thor's waist, and his arse firmly seated in Thor's lap, and his forearms resting at Thor's shoulders, and his fingers through Thor's hair—that warmth, that radiating prickle of delight, that slow-burning thrill at his center, that. He wanted that, and he was having it, and he wanted it still, and always.

'You don't know,' he said, 'how I've needed this.'

'But I do,' Thor said.

'Tell me what you told me before, tell me that—'

'Forever, then.' Thor leapt to say it; he tightened his fingers at Loki's waist as if he meant to hold him to his words, hold him in place for a thousand years. 'I swear that as long as you will it I will not go, never go, I will never—'

'Not forever,' Loki said, quietly. He gasped out half-phrases in the rhythm of the jut of Thor's cock into him. 'I don't want—that. But I trust—you—Thor. That you would—keep to your—word. Forever. If I had—ah. If I had asked you.'

Thor was nearly felled by feeling. Loki dropped himself down, and Thor rose to meet him in slow, hard thrusts, enough that Loki felt his bones tremble with the weight of Thor's body thumping against his; but Thor looked up into Loki's eyes, bright and wondering, seeming to stare into something inside of him. Soaking through that amazement was a more immediate simmer of lust; Thor quickened, sometimes, when it quickened in him, clutching his palms at Loki's sides or thighs or hips and bringing him down, spreading his legs, fucking him fullest.

When Thor's eyes closed, and his lips parted, Loki fell thoughtlessly into a kiss; he took deep, wet, pulls of kisses in time with the downwards heave of his body, the upwards heave of Thor's cock. He nearly floated out of himself with triumph at the noises Thor made.

Soon Thor was unbridled; Loki jounced in his lap, clinging, slipping slick kisses over the quick-moving, quick-panting spread of Thor's mouth, rocking himself towards pleasure, greater, ever greater. Even in view of forever he thought of the inevitable spending; please, Thor, please, make me spend, and love me, and kiss me, and only love me, but love me more, and again and again, but now at least only— I will not want— But I—

'Thor,' he said, because he could say nothing else that encompassed it.

When Thor finished he was wild and roaring, shining in sweat, putting his hands wherever on Loki he could, groaning 'Loki, Loki,' as if he wanted something from Loki, as if there were something of Loki he had not yet given to Thor; but Loki could give nothing that he had not given.

'Here,' he said, 'here I am, you have got me, you have got me, you have got me,' for God's sake why could Thor not see that he had got him, there, surrendered, open for him. After Thor's last thrusting-up into him, Thor's withdrawing, he said, in a low hissing begging, 'Fuck me with your fingers, Thor—now, Thor—do it, Thor, now!'

There was a moment—a second or two, pulled long by the hooks of an absolute lack—in which he thought that Thor would not, and from his lungs to his toes felt a plummeting. As soon as he had felt so, Thor was fucking him in vicious, indecorous jabs of three fingers, much too much and hot as sunspots; and, shuddering against Thor, pulling pleadingly at his own cock, he was torn up by spending, too. It wrestled and snapped through him firework-like, ripping at his insides, spattering out all in him that was warm and feeling.

When the last fleck of spend hit Thor's stomach, Loki melted slowly backwards, dislodging Thor's fingers from him, laying himself lissom, wet and spent against the linen, still cut through by final trembles.

With the little last strength in him he reached his hand between his legs, forearm brushing against cock and balls, and pressed his fingertips into his arsehole, smearing Thor's spend against his skin. It was so filthy a gesture that a shiver of mirth went through him. Thor seemed hardly to notice; he caught his breath, swept his hair back from his forehead, all the while solemnly fond, looking into Loki's face.

Loki closed his eyes. Nothing was real but the sound of Thor's breath, and the sound of the rain against the window-glass. He felt as if he had been wrung out like a cloth, and lay aching, limp, arse sore, thighs prickling with strain, chest rising and falling inconstantly. He felt the most terrible quiet inside of him. To imagine it going on and on, always and always, had pleased him, when they were fucking; he felt he had understood, finally, something about himself. He felt now only that he wanted Thor to let him alone, so he could clean himself, and let himself sink through the depths of feeling.

The mattress dipped as Thor settled alongside him, resting a sticky hand on his stomach. Loki, because he was too tired even to wrinkle his nose, allowed it. He felt his mouth consider moving towards 'I'm sorry,' and wondered why it was that his body had given out such a strange impulse.

Thor, tilting his head to press a kiss to Loki's shoulder, said, 'I have missed you, brother.' He did not wince, or hold his breath, or correct himself; he let the word settle, like a pebble between their bodies.

'I know, brother,' Loki said.

 

* * *

 

With the door to the bathroom flung open, they bathed: Thor first, because he did not linger in the bath, and Loki second, because he did. As Loki soaked in scented water, Thor knelt next to the bath and swept a soft cloth over the red of forming bruises on the insides of Loki's thighs.

Loki said, 'This won't heal them,' and Thor did it anyway, perhaps gentler than he had done it before.

When Loki's skin was damp and towel-patted, and the bathwater moaned through the drains, he stood at the sink, meaning to comb his hair before it dried in curls. For a long while, the comb went untouched; he pressed the heels of his hands to the edge of the sink and let his head tilt down, so that he saw only clean porcelain and the blur of his head in the silver drain.

Thor stood behind him; he breathed into his wet hair, and crept a hand between his thighs, feeling out softly for his hole. When Loki felt Thor's fingertips against him, his hands went white at the rim of the sink.

'Does it hurt?' Thor asked.

'It's tender,' Loki said, diplomatically; but his cock was filling. He found he wanted Thor, again, if only to toss something up as an offering to that terrible quiet in him.

So he let Thor put his cock between his thighs and rock slowly against him. With his hands still at the basin, he eased back to meet Thor, who leaned in to nip at his ear, and reached around him to tug at his cock. More than anything it was a compulsive release of their bodies. They felt that if they were to go too long without fucking, they would lose some small shard of each other. The push and pull of Thor's cock against sore skin made Loki bite his lip—but he spent, anyway, in a silent wash of warmth, his spend spreading thinly against the sink and Thor's fingers.

After Thor spent, in wet lines against the back of Loki's thighs, he bent Loki over the sink, spread his legs, dropped to his knees to the tiled floor, and licked away his own mess. After that, he cleaned him with a cloth.

'Do you feel different?' Loki asked Thor, as he was taking up his comb, and Thor was wringing out the cloth. He watched Thor in the mirror, avoiding letting in a glance of himself.

Without pause, Thor said, 'No.'

'Did you feel different after the first time? The very first time, at the lodge, that winter?'

Again Thor said, 'No.'

Loki wondered if Thor had learnt how to lie to him. More likely he hadn't. Loki imagined that Thor saw like a dog, all in half-color, the brightest of the brightest and the darkest of the darkest leaping out, the finer alterations fading. He must have felt something or other, some thing he could not name. He—slipping into cotton shirt and trousers, tying back his heat-thickened hair—must have shifted, somehow, if not deeply and irrevocably, then in quieter rustles of motion.

Stopping his combing, Loki turned to look at Thor, who looked back. It felt as if there were something in the looking that he had got to grasp, as if there were a message hidden in the picture; but he could not grasp it, and Thor was turning away, into the corridor.

 

* * *

 

In such rain, the sunset was only a slow blackening of the grey sky. Thor and Loki sat in the sitting room, dressing gowns tied around soft clothing, legs drawn up onto the silks of the sofas. Loki read by the faint light fallen in from the windows till he found the room had gone nearly black, whereupon he bade Thor light the lamps.

Thor did not take his seat on the sofa, after he had lighted the lamps. He lumbered, loud even in stocking feet, into the shadows of the corridor. From it echoed the groan of an opening door, then faraway stirring. He returned with an envelope; a golden seal flickered out from the white of it.

'It's from Mother,' he said. 'She gave it to me to deliver. She told me—that I was to watch you read it, but wasn't to ask you what it said, unless you told it to me.'

Loki took the envelope from Thor, and held it so tightly that it wrinkled in his hand. The cool quiet of the room slipped and spun about him; the ticking of the clock, the ticking of the raindrops, faded into a ringing in his ears. He felt on the verge of vomiting in his mouth. Frigga had known him; she had known that if she had posted it, or if Thor had given it to him without watching him read it, he would have ripped it up and burnt it.

'I don't want to read it,' he said, and put a hand at each end of the letter, making to tear it apart.

Before he could give the first twists of his wrists, his forearms were shot through by pain. In a flicker, Thor, saying 'Don't you bloody dare,' had taken Loki's arms in his fists and jerked them away. The envelope, bent and crumpled and yet unripped, fluttered to the floor.

Loki leapt from the sofa, driving his fists against the wall of Thor's chest, crying, 'It's my letter, and I can do what I like with it!'

Thor, clutching Loki's forearms, holding in his struggling, said, 'She is my mother, and I shall do what she asks of me.'

Loki flung out a knee to Thor's stomach; Thor took the blow with a cough and a squint. Wrestling against him, wide-eyed and red in the cheeks, Loki said, 'I see it! I see, now, why you've come. You didn't want to be near me at all, did you? Dear brother? You were her messenger! Yes, you would do anything for Mother, wouldn't you? Even go to your Jotun wretch of a fuck-toy? Not that you mind that, exactly; three years of chastity must have had you positively drooling at the thought of having your cock in my mouth again. But Mother only minded about you as she could use you to get hold of me. If she knew you had fucked her darling son, she would rip out your eyes!'

'She trusted me,' Thor bellowed. 'She trusted me! She knew to trust me because she knew that I love you!'

'None of you _love me._ ' Loki curled his lip. 'I was an opportunity. I was your father's son because he knew of me, and thought that I might do him good. I was your brother because it was convenient. I wonder how much more he would loathe me if he knew you thought you loved me.'

With that, Loki let his arms fall limp, so that in the absence of his own strength, Thor seemed suddenly to overpower him, to pull him forth so roughly that he swayed.

Thor let loose Loki's arms. At once Loki leapt for the letter; Thor flew at him too quickly to stop from colliding with him, and knocking him down to the floor. On hands and knees, scraping his palms and elbows raw against the hardwood, Loki slipped towards where the letter had fallen; he had just got his fingertips against the paper before Thor was dragging him back by his ankles, tossing him onto his front, pressing a knee into his back and fixing his arms behind him.

'I shall do,' Thor repeated, like the toll of a bell, 'what she asks of me.'

With his face pressed to the floor, Loki saw only darkness, and smelt only wood wax. His wrists, crossed in the grip of one of Thor's hands, began to fall numb. Faintly there came the scratch of Thor's hand grasping along the floor, and the crackle of the envelope taken up.

Loki sent up a thin burble of, 'Stop, Thor, you're hurting me.'

'Read the letter,' Thor said. He dug his knee into Loki's back; Loki felt as if the weight of it crumpled his spine. 'Promise me that you will read it.'

'Please, Thor.' Loki knocked his forehead against the floor. Though his eyes were dry, he choked out the sort of whimper that always accompanied tears. 'Take it back to Mummy, if you like. I'll let you have it; I don't insist on tearing it up. Only let me alone, please, it hurts.' Another crying sort of whimper, for good measure.

'Promise to read the letter.' Ah, but in that was a sort of victory; Thor's voice had softened.

'You promise,' Loki said, straining towards his most pitiful cry, 'that you won't hurt me, any longer. Promise not to hurt me, and I will read the letter.'

'—All right,' Thor said. 'I promise.'

The weight lifted from Loki's back, and his lungs filled with air all at once. His hands and forearms itched with fresh blood-flow; he let them fall to his sides, fingers pressed to the floor in a tentative twitch towards rising. Thor, of course, had the envelope. There was no use in fighting to ruin it. Rising partially, Loki rubbed his hands at his face, mimicking wiping at tears; the irritation of it had his eyes red and watering, seeming swollen with tear-stings. So, stiff and sniffling, he stood and turned to Thor, who looked as if he had done a murder.

'The letter,' Loki said, extending his hand.

Thor gave over the letter; Loki snatched at it as if it was Thor who had been meaning to destroy it. He settled himself into an armchair, and by the sullen yellow light of the floor-lamp, tore at the fold of the envelope. To his lap fell two items: a piece of laid paper, folded in half, and a smaller envelope, wax-sealed and thick-bulging. With hands quivering, he took up the laid paper.

 

_My Loki,_

_Lest you think otherwise, and in your suspicion disregard me, I will preface this letter by writing that I speak to you now as no one but the woman who raised you. What I shall be to you, I leave for you to dictate. It is in your right to determine for yourself your identity, and, as much as is reasonable, the course of your life. I see now that this right has been heretofore denied you, though I am in the sorry position of being unable to alter the past._

_It does give me pain to be parted from you. I tell you this not to incite guilt in you, but to convey to you that, should you return to Asgard, you would find that that certain core of mother's love in me glows no less brightly than the day I held you first. It frightens me to imagine you might deny yourself a homecoming, feeling that you would return to a home in which the lights of real love had been snuffed out. Know that this is not so._

_If you do feel you ought to be gone from Asgard, I would like to give you a little knowledge. When last we spoke of the matter, Odin and I were so ill prepared to tell you of yourself, that I feel we must have appeared to have fought quite ferociously to stop one another from allowing you the truth. We only wished not to tell you what might have caused undue pain in you._

_I did not see you as you are: a young man with an extraordinary intellect and a desire for understanding, who ought to possess as much knowledge about himself as is possible. So I will tell you about myself, and when you have known a touch more of me, I will allow Farbauti to speak for herself. This is as much as I might do for you. I feel no small regret that it is so._

_Farbauti was always the lesser child, to our mother and father. I happened to have been the sort of young girl who, once groomed correctly, would attract a certain sort of fortune. Our mother and father saw an opportunity in me that they did not see in Farbauti, who was too much herself. To court, and to our mother and father, she seemed a disappointment._

_I was young, then, and did not understand how to be kind to someone to whom others were not kind. I was simply happy to have been in the good graces of our mother and father, and grasped at what petty praises I could win. Often I gained the favor of others at the expense of the dignity of my sister. I am ashamed of it. I feel that if I could have seen her truly, and given her my love, she would not have felt the sort of discontent which led her to Jotunheim._

_My favor of you owes itself not to any lack of love for Thor, but to a desire to rectify the imbalance which arises in a brotherhood so ruled by duty and position. As you and Thor grew, and Thor began to inhabit his place, I began to worry that you felt Farbauti's pain, and that without my intervention, you would fall to something like Farbauti's fate._

_I believed that if I taught you well, and loved you well, I would lead you to discover the place in life which is yours and yours alone. It is in the nature of brothers to envy each other—and if you believe that Thor has never envied you, you have not seen him truly. But when I saw that envy grew between the two of you, I persisted in believing that once you had fought through your boyhood, you would emerge into that place of your own, which would so satisfy you that you would see Thor no longer as a rival, but as a beloved brother only. My hope, if not my unerring belief, is that you might come into your place yet._

_My wish to keep you swaddled in self-assurance overwhelmed the part of my conscience which told me that you must know of yourself. I imagined that if I cared enough for you, you would trust so deeply in my love for you, and in the worth of your place in the world, that the truth of your birth would not wound you. With my love in my hand, I blundered._

_The only apology I might offer is the apology in which I meet your self-determination. Because I know Thor, I know that he will chase after you; that is the way in which his love for you functions. My love for you I must wield as wisely as I am able to do. I will tell you that you may do what you will with yourself._

_Because I have lived, I have earned a pile of sadnesses, pains, and regrets. So too have I amassed loves, and joys. These things must live together inside of a life. I beg you, however full you feel of sadnesses, do not hollow space for them by cutting your loves out of yourself. It would be as fatal as cutting out of yourself your real heart. If there is anything I might compel you to do, it is to love._

 

_I wrote earlier that once I had spoken for myself, I would allow Farbauti to speak for herself. Enclosed in the second envelope is a letter she wrote to be given to you, when you came of age. You may read it, or not. It belongs in your hands._

 

_With all the love in the stars,_

_Frigga_

 

The laid paper fell from Loki's hands and settled face-down in his lap. There was a heat in him so profound he felt as if he were burning himself from the inside. Thor had sat on the sofa across from him, and at Loki's stirring, looked up; when he saw Loki's face, he furrowed his brow, but was silent. The clock on the mantel chimed the half hour.

'There's another letter,' Loki said, flatly.

'Mother said I wasn't to force you to read that. Only the first.'

'Yes, well. Now that you've fairly broken my spine, I might as well read the whole of it.'

Loki's hands had stopped to shake. He swallowed, and looked for a moment to the smatterings of light through the window, feeling that a coolness washed through him. Quietly, he cracked open the seal to the smaller envelope, and withdrew the paper of his other mother's letter: paper stained by time, and by small brown speckles of blood.

 

 _My beloved child,_ the letter began. It felt as if all of Loki's ribs broke at once, snapping jaggedly into heart and lungs. He nearly lost hold of the paper; he pinched the sides of it between thumbs and forefingers, stilling it.

 

_If you read this you will know why I write. This is a goodbye letter. Now that I see you for perhaps the last time—you are asleep in a basket at my side, you are perfectly quiet—my happier thoughts of the future have gone. There was a time I thought I would raise you, and kiss your cheek each night, till you were a man and could stand up in the world without your sorry mother. Believe that I would have done my best. I love you so much that it shames me to know I leave you alone. How could I have made a child, out of my hope for a peaceful future, and hurt him so by leaving him? I do not know how I could have done it. In my dreams I give you all that I can give._

_Please, my darling, live well. Be honest, kind, and brave. Make a family of your own, and care for them. Kiss them often. I pray for your health and your happiness, and that you may have a long life, and that when you have come to the close of that long life, I may see you full-grown, and look upon you proudly._

_Now I will put down my pen, and kiss you as many times as I am able. I will sing you the song about the small bird. Remember that you liked that song when I sung it for you. Remember my blessings, and my many kisses._

_Goodbye, for now._

_Always yours,_

_your loving mother._

 

Without, the lights glittered on, and the wind whistled on. Loki turned the paper down. His face ached with the effort of holding still a sob; tears wet his lashes and fell, stinging lines into his cheeks. When he let his head fall forward, tears began to gather at the underside of his nose, and drip from the tip of it; with his eyes shut tight, he gave a thin hiccup of a laugh, and wiped the back of his hand across his face. Everything solid seemed to have gone out of him. His throat struggled through shallow breathing.

'Brother,' Thor said. He looked just as he had done when Loki had pretended to cry.

'Do you know what it was? … It was a letter from my mother. She wrote it to me. When she was'—his teeth caught the word in their trap; he stood baring them, staring murderously across at Thor, till he could force through a hiss of—' _dying._ '

He felt a child again, small as if he had just been born, helpless and without cruelty, crying to be held in arms that were then only bones perhaps crossed in a shallow grave. Bones yellow and speckled as the letter. His mother? Mother?

Well, she was dead, and he was grown. Her last letter remade so little of her self that it was almost meaningless. So she had wanted him to be a white-toothed fellow with a feather in his cap and a babe in his arms, halloing to the passing milkman. So she had wanted him to be like Thor, too. Ought Loki then to beat his fists against the floor—not the earth, even—and cry mother, mother, mother, if to summon up the spirit would be to summon up a thing that would cross its arms at him? His mothers were only people who wanted him to love the world, and make a family, and remember a song. He could not think of even a word to the song.

He tucked Farbauti's letter into its small envelope, and tucked that, alongside Frigga's letter, into the larger envelope. He pressed the crumpled flap of it closed.

'It must hurt,' Thor said.

'Oh, do you want me to tell you how pain feels?' Through the roughness in his throat, and the wrench of his face, he thrust out a laugh, drawing his lips back from his teeth. 'You must be imagining the times you've fallen off your horse, or stood for too long in formation. What hurt! What sorrow you've felt, Thor, blistering your hands firing a pistol!'

In a flame-lick of indignation: 'Or seeing my brother weep!'

Yes, there were tears still in Loki's eyes, and on his cheeks. Thor would have seen his eyelids swollen, his skin stung with salt, his nose leaking. Thor would have seen the flush in his cheeks, and the veins striking out from his throat. Thor would have seen a small boy, his little brother, whom he did not want to hurt. Thor would not have seen him.

Placing his letter neatly upon a side-table, Loki rose; the motion seemed to raise Thor, too, so that they faced each other, there, two small spots close together in the wide, wide world. Dark space had its maw open, holding all things on the flat of its tongue, and Thor and Loki, like atoms in the maw, converged.

'She loves you,' Thor said to Loki, who did not know who he meant. Mother, or mother? Thor had his hand at Loki's cheek, then his lips at Loki's forehead.

'I don't mind,' Loki said, 'about that sort of thing.'

'You do mind.'

'I suppose you think that I mind about you, too.'

'You do.'

Best to give it up. Thor was pressing his thumb to the line of tears against Loki's cheek, blotting skin-oil at the salt-burn. Loki laughed, clearly, and turned away, sweeping towards the doors to the terrace, which he opened. Fingers of wind pulled against the fabric of the curtains, curling them inwards; Loki passed the threshold and felt spring air, humid and warm, so soft at the nose and mouth that he could not help but breathe.

It had stopped to rain. Last drops pattered from the eaves above, flecking in his hair, spotting his skin. Thor's footsteps behind him, but really he didn't mind about that sort of thing; only how soft the air was. He wanted to stroll with Thor through the quieter streets, licking at lemon gelato and plucking leaves from the trees along the pavement. How happy they would have been, if not themselves.

'I am staying,' Loki said, now conversational, resting his forearms on the balustrade, peering into the puddles in the street. All glittered wetly under street-lamps. Wheels of taxis hissed through water pooled at corners. 'Not here forever, no, I couldn't bear it. I'll go to Berlin, next. Then Cairo, then Tokyo, then Moscow...'

Thor rested his hand at Loki's forearm; his palm was warmer than the air. 'I'm to be posted to Vanaheim,' he said. 'I'll serve the usual three years, and then...'

'You mean it would never have mattered, my returning.'

'It would have mattered a great deal.'

'Hmm, well.'

It was a time for quiet; for listening to the sounds of the city. What could seem urgent in autumn and winter was peaceful, in those early days of spring. Everyone had gone in from the rain, and had not yet come out. Once or twice a figure wandered below, formless as a shadow detached from its body. Above, the sky was flat, starless, greyish with city light; such a number of people lived beyond them, lighting the lamps in their own apartments, giving that little light to the greater glow. Thor stroked his fingers over the skin of Loki's forearm, through the thin black hair, over the constellations of freckles.

'Let's go to bed.' Thor said this into Loki's hair; he was pressing his lips to the side of Loki's head, and tugging gently at Loki's wrist, which was tender, still, from being fixed behind his back. 'We'll make the best of it.'

'Oh, you would have me again, after all of that.'

'After most anything,' Thor said.

Loki turned to Thor, whose face in the darkness was marked out only by the minnow-gleams of the far-off glow, stroking along nose and cheek, beading in fair eyes; and he thought that his brother was beautiful. His mind delivered the thought in cupped palms, like a gift in whole: with 'beautiful' came the inextricable 'brother.' The spark of it, gentle and small, hurt him so thoroughly he prayed he would not have to live. He would. He would go again to the bed he had made, and lie in it, and let Thor fuck him in it. That was the counterbalance to his wanting: his having. The scales evened, and the pendulum swung back.

'I want just a minute,' he said. 'It's pleasant, here.'

Side-by-side, they stood, tilting their heads back to the sky, looking for stars and finding instead the spots of raindrops falling from the eaves far above. Those, too, were in the air, shining, before they fell; then they were only water.

 

* * *

 

Dawn dawned as it often did, which is to say brightly, though with a touch of winter that morning, enough to have breath fogging. In the sitting room of his apartment, Loki drank a cup of jasmine tea, then telephoned his driver, and, speaking quietly so as not to wake Thor, ordered the driver to come round to the front of the building.

In the guest room, with his hair spread golden across pillow, and his mouth parted red in slow breathing, Thor slept. Loki drew open the drapes, so that sun spilled across Thor, drawing out the brightness in him. Light would not wake Thor; Loki had wanted only to look at him. He pressed a kiss to Thor's warm forehead. With the softness of Thor's skin glowing still at his mouth, Loki wrapped his scarf round his neck, buttoned his overcoat, and swept down to the front of the building, where his driver waited.

The city was sorbet in sunrise, all orange-bright and in shadows lavender, smoothed soft by the fog of exhaust and the steam from the grates. It was a morning for travelling; the wind was the wind in his sails. He stepped into the car, and shut the door.

'Very well then,' he said to the driver. 'On we go.'

 

* * *

 

As Loki and his fellows were breakfasting, the morning after the morning Loki left Thor, Malekith took a sheet of a newspaper from his satchel, and thrust it across the table at Loki. Slowly, with eyes half-lidded as though in sleepy boredom, Loki deigned to take up the paper.

It was the society section of the _New York Globe_ ; in it there was a line, only one, buried in the telegraphic roll-call of the 'Who's Where?' column, reading, _HRH the Crown Prince Thor of Asgard and HRH Prince Loki of Asgard at Le Mot Juste, April 28_ _th_ _._

'Shall we consider you indoctrinated, again?' Malekith asked, rubbing an idle thumb over his signet ring. 'What was all of that about not running home to Papa?'

Loki let the paper fall from his hands, and wiped his fingers on his napkin. 'I said that I might have done,' he said, taking up his fork.

'You were taking the piss, then,' Thanos said. 'All this time.'

'By all means'—Loki spoke with a flourish of his hand, trailing the tines of his fork through the air, graceful as a conductor's baton—'leave me, if you don't trust me.'

With pox-spots of blush in his pale cheeks, Malekith withdrew the sheet of newspaper, crumpling it into his satchel. Likely he thought of his home city, forever Asgard's and rotting with it. He crossed his arms over his chest, when reclining in his chair; he hid his signet ring beneath the powder-blue folds of his shirt.

'Or stay,' Loki said, lifting a shoulder, spearing his fork into his meat.

 

* * *

 

Bruises unfolded on his wrists and forearms where Thor had held him back. In the week after they parted, Loki—in dull, early lectures, or on one of the benches in the quadrangle, or at his desk in his white-walled room—liked to unbutton his cuffs, peel back the sleeves of his shirts, and rub his fingers over the bruises, feeling for the sore spots. In time the mottling faded from violet to pale green to paler yellow. When Loki could see it only by inspecting his skin in bright light, he battered his forearms against the edge of a table till new bruises unfolded. Then the new bruises faded, and he did it again, and once again.

With a plastic point-and-shoot—which in advertisements was wielded by smiling seaside couples, or yellow-haired girls in white gloves and lipstick—he took photographs. Holding the camera in one hand, he extended the opposite arm before the lens, and snapped dim, grainy photographs of the line of his forearm, pale but for the paint-dabs of bruises. Varnish on his nails, sometimes chipping, most often immaculate; veins like tributaries in his wrists.

He imagined he would show the pictures to Thor, one day, and say, _Do you remember this? Do you remember how it felt to hurt me?_ In truth he tucked the photographs into the covers of books, which then stood forgotten, spines fading in years of sunlight.

 

##  _the stars_

A slant of eastern light fell through the slit of the drapes: it cut through the gilt-bronze and bone-china of the vases before the window, through to the cherry-wood of the table which held the vases, through to the sea-depths of the carpeting beneath the table, through to the cream of the linen which fell from bed to carpet, through to the limbs which draped over the bed, through to the locks of hair which stroked, sun-scaled, between Loki's fingers. Through, at last, to the apple-skin mouth circling round Loki's cock. Loki saw little of Thor's mouth, for Thor tilted his head, and his eyes came into the slant of sun and filled water-like with light.

Loki's skin rippled with the thrill of beauty, and his head fell back against the pillow; the end-tendrils of his hair curled against the lines of his upper ribs.

'Oh help me,' he breathed, though he rather wanted then to be damned.

Thor sucked determinedly, fastidiously, at the head of Loki's cock, till Loki—'Oh, really, help me'—drew his hips taut and his spine to a swan-curve, and spent heaving, skimming his toes along Thor's flank, tossing the side of his face against the pillow as if by force struck into it. The sun slanted yet; it slipped past Thor's face and towards Loki's hips, bringing into relief the spend spotting at his skin.

With Thor holding fast to his sides, and Thor's cheek cradled between his hips, Loki said, 'It's far past time. We've been lingering.'

'Yes,' Thor said, but did not stir.

So they shut their ears to the whirring of the world on its axis, and lay against each other. Thor, who had taken his place next to Loki, watched the skin of Loki's shoulder; Loki watched light and shadow in the wrinkled linen. The corridors of the palace were fizzing, alive, encircling them; in the center of the nesting-doll they lay still, though there was a day to be got on with.

The shadows in the linen were thinning. The sun was—yes, it often did rise. Which meant rocks moving about a sphere of hot liquid, and he holding his brother in bed, specks to the rocks and the sphere, which were specks to the specks of greater specks, and onwards speckling, and he holding his brother in bed. And even his brother had a meeting with someone or other.

'Really,' Loki said, to which Thor, without stirring, said, 'I know.'

Some time later, buttoning his shirt before the mirror by his armoire, Thor said, 'I don't know why Father insists I meet with General Ostergard. I don't know what he wants from me; I haven't anything to say to him. I can only ask so many questions about his children.'

'Ask him'—rising up behind him, Loki draped a blue tie over Thor's shoulders, letting his fingers linger against the crisp pinstriped sweep of his shirt-front—'what he thinks of the Jötnar having launched all of those submarines they weren't meant to have built in the first place.'

Rolling his shoulders back to shake away Loki's hands, taking up the ends of his tie, Thor said, 'I was trying not to think about that.'

'Yes, I know you intend not to think about anything remotely important, but they'll expect you to do it, sooner or later. Meanwhile I shall be off thinking of nothing. I think I'll have a swim, and then eat lunch in the gardens, and spend the afternoon on watercolors. There's a flower I'd like to paint.'

Loki pressed a kiss beneath Thor's ear; he let his mouth linger tender at the skin, wetting downy hair, before turning away, tying closed his dressing gown, floating across the room.

With his tie strung between his hands like a cat's cradle, Thor said, 'Shut up, you hellion,' though Loki was shutting the door, saying, 'You see, I am shutting up, you beast.'

 

* * *

 

In his own rooms, where the in the mornings the light was flat and diffuse, he stood before his own armoire. He tied his own tie, tucked his shirt into his trousers, fastened his braces, flicked fingers nimbly over buttons of cuffs and waistcoat. Beneath his jacket, he tucked one of the scarves Thor had brought him, ever so long ago. His hair was now unseemly long; he brought it up in a deft French twist, held near to his skull by a silver clip of Frigga's he had taken from her vanity. With hair up, one could see that his neck was marred by a spot of violet, staining the skin above the apparent vein.

None of this was so pedestrian as—God forbid—dressing for battle; Loki likened it to shedding a plain skin in favor of a more luminous one. Now gleaming, iridescent, sinuous, he passed through the door which parted his bedroom and his study. He slithered into the wing-backed chair standing imperially behind his desk, and rung the service bell.

He was lounging in his chair, tossing a trinket from one hand to the other, when Hall entered with his breakfast tray.

'Oh good,' he said, as Hall put the tray before him. 'You're only thirty minutes past the time I _like_ to have my breakfast; it's almost as if you care a little for me, making such an immense effort not to forget your duties entirely. Ought I to chastise you for indulging me?'

Hall's eyes, a shallow milk-blue, flickered to the spot on Loki's neck, then to the center of his face. 'My sincerest apologies, Your Highness.' He seemed to want to say something more; Loki waved his hand, and he said, 'I was late returning from my chat with Algrim.'

'Were you? He couldn't have had so much to say.'

Loki's breakfast tray had enveloped the whole of his attention. In Vienna, he had acquired a taste for their _Frühstück_ ; each morning, the kitchens of the Royal Palace fixed him a tray of buttered rolls, Danish pastries, soft-boiled eggs, apricot preserves and small pots of honey, wedges of Emmental and Camembert, a bowl of muesli and a glass of orange juice and a _café mélange_. By the first sip of foam from his coffee, he was rapturous. Thor, of course, was off eating salmon and remoulade on rye, like any nice, home country Aesir.

'If I may say so,' Hall was saying, 'he did. I wouldn't go so far as to say this is a done thing, mind you, but he tells me Jotunheim is in talks to negotiate a pact of non-aggression with Muspelheim.'

Smearing a piece of bread in apricot preserves, Loki said, 'Muspelheim is quibbling with Vanaheim over some footnote in _their_ pact. The ink is dry, functionally speaking. You're not telling me they plan to cross Vanaheim?'

'I'm suggesting so,' Hall said.

'Well it would be all the better for me. We don't want Muspelheim bitching things up in Jotunheim before the Jötnar have got a toe into Asgard.' Loki bit into his bread, swallowed, cleared his mouth with a prim sip of coffee, and looked expectantly up at Hall.

The sweat-dewed, noble-jawed boy was now neither sweat-dewed nor noble-jawed; adulthood had softened him, blurring the planes of his jaw and his cheekbones, drawing his fair hair back a notch from the sides of his head. Still he was reassuringly handsome, fine in a dark suit. He was acclimating well; his Norse was good, he liked the food, and the others in the royal household trusted him. To the family he was celebrated as a sort of exotic bird Loki had taken as a souvenir of his grand tour. 'I don't know how you convinced him to come to Asgard,' some cousin had said, and she hadn't known that Hall had left an open spot in a steel production company.

So this bird, in his modest dark-suit feathering, had perched before him, and was singing quite cheerfully—that is, saying, 'I agree, sir,' which was cheerful as anything Loki could hope to hear.

'Why don't you arrange a meeting with Thanos,' Loki said, 'and tell him to chat with our fellow in the Jötnar War Office. I'd rather like to help the pact along—if you can manage it, you tardy traitor, and if not, what will we do with you.'

'I can manage it,' Hall said. 'Would you like me to do it straightaway, sir?'

'Oh, as soon as you're able. I'm beastly bored by all of this waiting. Well, don't break your neck running. Come here.' Loki pinched a piece of pastry, flaking and sugar-sticky, between his thumb and forefinger, and held it out to his side.

Hall came round to the side of his desk, lowered his head to Loki's hand, and took the pinch onto the flat of his pink tongue.

Loki said, 'I'd like my lunch when I like it,' whereupon Hall swallowed.

 

* * *

 

In the conservatory, once, over watercress sandwiches, scones and strawberries and cream, Thor said, 'You aren't having him? Your...houseboy?' He smoothed his cream-spotted fingertips along his napkin.

'Do we feel territorial, now?' Loki laughed. 'Are we pissing on our property?'

'If you were having him,' Thor said, 'it would be rotten of you.'

'Please, don't be tedious.' Loki gave a wide-mouthed bite to a strawberry; he lopped off half of its body in one clench of teeth. 'You have a private life of your own, don't you? Have you taken Lady Sif to bed?'

It was like lapping up cream: Thor's hurt melted richly, sweetly, on Loki's tongue. Or that was the strawberry, perhaps, which he chewed in slow, savoring rolls of the jaw, drawing out the silence between them.

Just as Loki swallowed, Thor said, 'No.' There was a shifting guilt about him; he was silent, holding still a tongue swollen with some other word, something to be spit up after he had allowed Loki his turn at a taunt. Loki said nothing, and Thor, lancing the swell of his guilt, said, 'It isn't a thing to be done lightly.'

Loki thought of Lady Sif—finely wrought, mobile mouth, arching brows, indomitable—pulling Thor down for a kiss, senseless that Thor thought only of how Loki's lips, his gestures, his desires, were different to her own. No, it wasn't a thing to be done lightly.

When Loki was sixteen, seventeen, smooth-faced and smaller-bodied, he had supposed that it would end, someday; that he and Thor would open twin doors at the end of the corridor of their love, and walk into the skins of their separate selves. They would love each other as they had loved each other in boyhood. They would marry good women, and love them in the passion-way. Well—

Raindrops fell to the conservatory windows, plucking echoes from window-glass; it was the sound of someone rubbing idle fingers over piano keys, catching an idle nail at the string of a violin. But the sun was shining—there was light ripe and dense in peachy air, glittering in the sweat on Thor's brow.

Tilting his head towards the sky, Loki said, 'They say that a sun-shower means a fox is being married, don't they? In France it's a wolf.'

'Better the fox,' Thor said. 'That's the one more like you.'

Loki gave an eye-wrinkling, teeth-baring smile; it was so human a smile that he startled himself with it. Presently Thor, too, was smiling, and at once Loki was reduced to the basest sort of person: the sort who felt, and felt fully, and could not help but let their full feeling flood out of them.

—Well, there were no doors at the end of the corridor. They moved through an orbit, elliptical and regular, pulling closer, then farther, from the sphere of pure love. Now they were closer. Loki could do little but let himself spin through to somewhere colder, darker, where he might say something like, 'And will you marry her, your Lady Sif? And will you give me up? Pretend you've never had me, for your darling's sake?'

As it was, it was not the season; the rain that fell to the conservatory windows was the hot rain of late spring.

It was late enough spring for strawberries. The ones in the bowl were recently picked; it had not been so long since they had sat with their thousands of brothers in some southern patch, covered over by greenery, fattening and reddening in sun. It would not be so long until the end of the Valhalla 'season'; then all of society would take the train into the country, and eat strawberries on the lawns of their summer houses.

But the spring was always longer than the autumn; Loki had time enough to gorge himself on strawberries, and then to gorge himself on Thor. With a mouth still sticky with fruit-nectar, he kissed the inside of Thor's forearm, and left shining spots along his skin.

 

* * *

 

Spring was the season of dancing, of the hedge-maze choreography which spun all the little lovelies into the avenues and byways of flirtation. A lucky few would find themselves pirouetting into the core of passion, out of which they would emerge inextricably tied, that is to say married. The less lucky would stumble to the edges of the ballrooms, left to sit in stiff chairs and sip at champagne. To the chagrin of the matchmakers, Thor and Lady Sif only circled through the maze's middle passages, drawing no nearer the center, drifting no nearer the edges. Each night, they danced the correct two dances, after which they were swept into the arms of their other partners.

That spring, all of society woke in the mornings to read in the papers of another one of Jotunheim's slights, another fleet of weapons built, another ten thousand boys enlisted. In the evenings, they put down their papers and went to stir frenziedly through the ballrooms. Under threat of war, decadence lifted to its absolute height: they were all young, and would not be young by the end of a long war, and so had got to throw a war's worth of parties in the span of one season.

Lady Sif was twenty-one; by the end of a six-year war, the better part of her youth would have been wasted on modest wartime. So she lived like a _flambé_ : she bet on horses and race cars, and matched drinks with Thor, and once stripped down to her underclothes and leapt into the fountain at the front of the Royal Palace. For a week afterwards, the society pages burst with photographs of a pale figure blurring towards the fountain, underlined by boldfaced yelps of CHIEF OF INTEL.'S DAUGHTER EXPOSED AT ROYAL PALACE. In the yellower papers, it was PRINCE THOR'S SWEETHEART SHOWS SKIN.

The matchmakers mumbled that Lady Sif was unfit, that in light of the troubles with His Majesty's heart, it was time His Royal Highness think seriously of marriage. It was Odin, too, who threatened to snap Asgard away from its heretofore ordinary life: he sometimes gasped for breath, sometimes swayed with dizziness, once or twice fainted entirely. Physicians were shunted in and out of his private rooms. One evening, at a family dinner, he told Thor he ought to find a likelier girl to court. The dark belly of the remark was that he needed an heir, sooner rather than later. Thor gulped down his wine.

A week afterwards, Lady Sif was drooping on a divan at the edge of a ballroom, and Thor was dancing a glum gavotte with a likelier girl, and Loki asked Lady Sif for the next dance.

Her wrist was very thin, caught in the clasp of Loki's fingers. As they danced, she held it rigid, aloft, as if under his touch her arm was hardening slowly into marble. But she was not so discourteous as to refuse him; and so he flew her through the stepwork, sprightly and fluid as fountain-spray.

'Won't His Royal Highness be cross with you?' she asked him, putting her face up to his.

'You mean,' he said, 'you're cross with me.'

She gave an equanimous lift of the shoulder. 'Cross that he isn't so good at dancing.' With a darkening face, and a sudden sweep into him, she whispered: 'Fair enough that you have something on him, if only that.'

Yet because he asked, she danced with him again the night after, and again the night after. Each time she began rigid, and each time softened slowly. She chimed a little, when swept into a glorious spin, then repaired herself to a dignified coolness. He thought it would not be so terribly difficult to have her love him.

To Thor, he said, 'Better she dance with me than with that windbag Egill Grettisson; he's got jowls like wet linen, and puts his hand too low on the back.'

Smiling, Thor told him, 'It's good you're getting on with her.' Likely he thought Loki was doing him the favor of keeping her at court, in wait for her darling the Crown Prince, like keeping the kettle warm on the stove. Always thoughtful, his brother. From across the room, he watched his two beloveds dancing.

The days turned, showing their halves in such quick succession that the season seemed one long spinning of a flipped coin: night, day, night, day, blurred into a glittering whole. The air grew warmer, and the insects crept out. Tiers of feathered hats and tailcoats, opera-coats and Chinese silk, moved down the red-velvet of staircases, into the pools of the ballrooms. Coupe glasses were filled with champagne, then drained of it; silver salvers were piled with game which, by the end of the night, would be picked through to the bones.

When the cups had been drained and the salvers cleared, and stockings worn through and gowns stained with sweat, Thor and Loki would wander, drunk, to the residence. Always they told each other, 'Well, I'm retiring,' and 'Yes, I had better settle in.' Sometimes they did; sometimes they fell into each other, and fell into one of their beds. Then they fucked slowly, sloppily, slipping through each other. They laughed to think that either of them had ever thought of loving another.

'I had always wanted you,' Loki said, once, after an evening of absinthe and aquavit; he was half-soft, but stretched wide around Thor's cock, thighs split over Thor's hips, palms pressing to Thor's chest. 'I had wanted you since before I knew about desire.'

Thor had his fingers through Loki's hair, lodged in the tangles. He drew Loki down, close enough to kiss, and said, 'I always want you.'

'I know,' Loki said, though he did not see what Thor meant, then. He thought only that Thor would always have him, but that was much different.

In the mornings, while Thor was having a swim to cure his hangover, Loki sat in his study and looked over the files Hall brought him: maps charting the movements of the gathering troops, rolls of telegrams sent through the higher ranks of the Aesir military, irritated interjections from Prime Minister Heimdall, who disagreed with the Chief of War on whether to construct a line of defense along the border or to spend the money on aircraft. In the afternoons, Loki gave Hall rounds of directives to pass along to his moles.

After all, Malekith had gone into intelligence, if only because Loki had told Thor to put a word in for an old school chum. He spent eighteen hours of the twenty-four crunched into his cubby in the code-and-cypher section of the Intelligence Office, where he worked under Lady Sif's father. Then there were the others. One of the three minor Svartalfar worked in trade intelligence; another was in radio communications. The third had been planted in a special operations organization officially titled the Department of the Under-Secretary of Trade Registrations. Thanos served as an advisor to General Ostergard; Loki tasked him with the effort of stopping the Chief of War's plans for a line of defense.

'For Christ's sake,' said Loki to Hall, as Hall buttered his toast for him, 'they could build bunkers and supply depots for ten years, and in a month of war, the Jötnar will have knocked them all over like so many dominoes. Heimdall is right, though I don't blame the rest for failing to see it; one doesn't expect that grade of rightness from a man with a law degree. … Well, someone's got to fight his corner.'

He told Hall that he wanted this or he wanted that, and Hall wandered off to assignations at public parks or train stations, and whoever Hall had met floated into the numb void, where somehow Loki's will was wrought into being. It was all so frightfully easy that Loki was almost shocked to hear Odin say, one evening, 'It may well be unavoidable. I shall do what I might, but I fear...'

And in the afternoons, the shadows lengthened, and Hall began to stare, blurry-eyed, out of the window in the study. Loki took his tea with Frigga or Thor, or the both of them; they sat in the conservatory, where spring sun glazed the fruits and biscuits, and sipped at floral tea. The talk was pointedly not of war. When one of them asked him what he had done that day, he would say, 'Nothing, really. Bothered with a Schubert sonata... Sketched several quite pretty flowers; lilies, I believe.'

 

* * *

 

'Do you ever wonder,' Thor began, once, as they lounged together in the conservatory. He was peeling an orange with a knife, that day; he held the knife steady and spun the globe of the orange in his palm, so that a long curl of rind pulled away from the flesh. On and on he peeled, and said nothing more, though Loki listened.

'I do sometimes wonder,' Loki said, droll, stretching on the sofa in the late sun.

'I forgot what I was thinking of.'

'You didn't forget.'

'Do you ever wonder if we will stop,' Thor said.

A sprig of the rind slipped loose from beneath the blade of the knife and fell to Thor's lap. Loki plucked it between his fingers and held it beneath his nose: citrus, clean and tangy, wakening him from the afternoon's drowse.

Closing his eyes, taking in the scent, Loki said, 'That, I don't wonder.'

'No,' Thor said. 'That's why I'd thought better of asking.'

Then, in the quiet of the room, only the scrape of Thor's knife along the rind, steady and careful as breathing.

 

* * *

 

Soon the 'white nights' were upon them, and the sky was forever the pale blue of one of Frigga's powder-puffs. On midsummer's eve, Thor and Loki took a few intimates to the fjord just south of Valhalla, where the water was cool against the hot air; the dozen of them sat on the deck of Odin's yacht, gliding slowly towards the southern coast.

Beneath twinkling lights, they braided flower-garlands through each other's hair. They drank peach schnapps, and ate potatoes and herring and almond-cakes, and went honey-slow through drunkenness, singing into the endless twilight, stripping off their clothing and leaping into the fjord, splashing and floating and singing still, soaking their hair till the garlands wilted and unravelled and drifted along the surface of the water, out towards who knew where. The sea.

Thor performed a series of dives, and the rest of the intimates cheered for him, and Loki floated on his back in the cool water, staring serenely into the blue midnight. High, cottony clouds tumbled through the upper sky; the lights of the yacht blinked in the ripples of the stirring water. Loki thought only that he did not, then, feel like a traitor, though he was one.

Lady Sif was having her turn at diving, and Thor was swimming towards Loki, parting the water with his broad arms, stroking his wet hands along Loki's wet shoulders. Loki let his body fall so that he was upright, bobbing inertly in the water, like a message in a bottle.

To the other swimmers, who were not looking anyway, he and Thor would have seemed scarcely shadows in the water. So veiled, they held fast to each other, and kissed the salt-water out of each other's mouths.

'Fine midsummer's eve,' Loki said.

'Best we've had in years. The sky is beautiful.' Thor put his face up to it, seeming to breathe the blue into him. 'Someday we'll sleep out of doors, again, the way we used to do.'

'You can fuck me in front of the bonfire. Then throw me into it after.'

'I meant it.'

'I meant it, too.'

'I hope,' Thor said, lifting his hands from the water, taking Loki's damp face in his palms, 'that I shall have another chance at you. Someday. In a world in which we matter less, and can do as we like. Then we will sleep out of doors all midsummer.'

Loki nearly let himself slip under the water, in hopes he would be reborn. He had little faith in the thought—but wanted to believe in this kinder world of Thor's, where they could love each other unpricked by the thorns which in their world always wreathed the softer hours. This, though, was their world. They were brothers really, and Loki was wicked really, and Thor was blind really, and they were bloody with their badness. Washed clean a little, when swimming; but bloody really.

'You don't know how silly you sound,' he said. 'You must think yourself terribly loving.' Then he kissed Thor with such sensual slowness that it was like swallowing down the thorns. Far off, by the yacht, someone was calling for Thor to swim back, and join in another round of drinks. '...Well, you aren't; only hopeless.'

'You too,' Thor said, and slipped deftly into the water, one paint-stroke of brown in the greater darkness.

On the sun-deck, they sat in soft robes, toasted with their cups of schnapps, and licked up the crumbs of the almond-cakes. They were too drunk to swim, so braided new garlands into their hair, and put on records and danced to them. The sky was as vividly blue as it had been in the early evening; it tricked them into believing that there was no longer night, the finite space in which to have all one's dancing and drinking, but midsummer, which would go on for so long that it was the next thing to forever.

Loki taught Lady Sif the faddish steps he had learned abroad. When she, still twisting her hips, said, 'But damned if I know what he's singing,' he taught her how to sing some stumbling English:

'A fine little girl, she, er—'

'Waiting for—'

'Right, waiting for me—'

'I catch a ship across—'

'Across the sea—'

'I sail that ship all alone; never think how—'

'How I'll make it home—'

By the darkest hour, the dozen had burnt the thought of war out of their minds, and lived not hoarding pleasure, but rolling languorously through it, rubbing droplets of schnapps from each other's mouths, stumbling into swaying embraces. They sat on the edge of the deck, their bare legs trailing through the air, and to the brightening sky sung: _Dawn, go away, I'm no good for you..._

Loki rose from the edge at which the others sat, crossed the sun-deck, and rested his forearms against the starboard railing. His hair had dried, and hung along his shoulders in brittle waves; there were flowers, crumpled and fading, still peeking out from the curls. In Lady Sif's hair, too; he saw so when she came to join him. They were both so stupid with drink that, though they spoke to each other, they largely slurred through their own private thoughts.

Lady Sif was saying, 'and for all I know we won't have a war at all. There's still a chance, isn't there, that we won't. ... Do you suppose we will?'

'Oh, Lady Sif.' Loki would have laughed, but felt the crevasse between his mind and body so flooded that he could hardly float words across it. 'I know we will.'

'How would you know?'

'Doesn't your dear papa tell you these things?' Stretching his arms over the railing, leaning his face towards the face of the water beneath, he said, 'About the pact of non-aggression with Muspelheim, Jotunheim's pact I mean, and the line of defense the Chief of War is championing...'

'Does _your_ father tell you state secrets,' said Lady Sif drily.

'He tells Thor. God knows what use they would be to the cretin.'

Lady Sif leaned against him, slipping her hand along his forearm, gently at first, tenderly, and he thought it was a love-touch _._ He expected her to put her face up for a kiss; instead she tightened her fingers round his wrist and clenched till he felt the small bones grinding against each other. Quietly, cutting her nails into the thin skin of his wrist, she said, 'Do you really imagine I'll stop caring for him, and come to care for you, instead?'

Laughing, leaning close to her, he said, 'Why, do you find you care for me?'

'Thor cares for you.' She leaned back from him, dropped his arm, and looked out onto the horizon, which was whitening with dawn. 'Always wondered why it is that he does. Never knew. I can't bear my own brother; I don't know why Thor should feel bound to bear his.'

'It's more than that he's bound,' said Loki.

'Is it? I think that is the sort of man Thor is.'

Daybreak cut through the twilight; the yacht turned through the curves of the fjord, destined once more to Valhalla.

In the city, they were unlocking the bunkers beneath the city centre; they were taking their places at the round tables; they were sending their children to the countryside. Factories in peace abandoned were grinding through their work again. Rifles left from the last war were taken from the depots and put into the soft hands of the new enlistments, who glowed with that heroism which haloed only the heads of boys who had not ever been to war.

Someday those boys would put their bullets into Jötnar bodies, or have Jötnar bullets put into them. They would all bleed beautifully, then fester, and suffer. They would die blessing the king's sons; they would die cursing the men who had done this to them, so cursing the king's sons, too.

Was Thor bound to care for him? Well then, Thor was bound to care for him. A hundred thousand boys were bound to fight. The world was bound to turn; well then, let it turn! Let all things do as they were bound! Let him be damned, if he was bound to be damned.

Alone on the starboard side, Loki leaned his head over the water and shook his head; the last of the flowers fell from his hair, and were pulled into the furrows of the boat's wake.

 

* * *

 

By noon, Loki had returned to the palace. He was sour-skinned in day-old clothes, hollow-eyed and parched, hair curled and loosely braided; he smelt of salt-water and peach schnapps, and could bear sitting in the same room with himself only after Hall had opened the windows in his study. The steady city midday stood in the air outside of the windows, rarely blowing through; when a breeze passed between the velvet drapes, Loki swooned.

The world was of little consequence to him, then. He turned a doubtful eye to the things on his desk—a map, struck through by markers, and sheaves of typewritten papers, spotted with red-ink stamps declaring level of classification, sometimes with shorthand scribble of Loki's own—and recalled that there was something he had been meaning to do. It was, he supposed, as good enough a time...

Hall approached bearing a glass tumbler of cold water, at the bottom of which two tablets of Alka-Seltzer fizzed into a wet cumulonimbus. In his other hand he held a Japanned tray; that one had birds painted on, Loki thought, but the picture was covered over by an arrangement of rosettes, spritz cookies, cardamom bread and coconut rolls. Loki drank the Alka-Seltzer first, and felt the dry ache in the front of his face ease away.

'Do you know,' he said, chewing on a rosette, 'I'm damned sick of everyone knowing there will be a war. They are all getting in too much pleasure for themselves.'

'Understandably, sir,' said Hall, who, by a benevolent good work of Loki's, had got in some pleasure for himself.

'It's almost as if they're happy. They're all falling in love. Who would have thought it?' Swallowing, dusting his mouth with a napkin, slipping out of the sheaves a selection of papers, he said, 'Of course they were right to do it. The ones who have had their weddings will feel frightfully lucky. Hall, erase whatever it is you've pencilled in for today; we've work to do.'

Hall seemed to hold out some hope that Loki did not mean to say what he meant to say; his shoulders were stiff, his eyes bright, as if he kept himself from springing into motion. Poor boy—not that he was a boy now, any more than Loki was. Over a second rosette, Loki arranged the papers he had chosen.

'Who would you say, Hall, out of the minor operatives, is the most fervent? Who believes most strongly in his cause?'

'The Svartalfar come to mind, sir,' said Hall. 'Perhaps chiefly Algrim.'

'Very well. Algrim, then.' Loki fed a clean sheet of paper into his typewriter and set his hands to the keys. Over the precise _tack-tack_ of the typebars against the platen, he said, 'I'm giving you the time, date, port of departure, and projected route of a forthcoming voyage of a Vanir ocean liner. The Rosamunde, it's called. Lovely name. It's due to sail from Asgard three weeks from today. Three days across the White Sea, then it's scheduled to dock in Vanaheim. I want Algrim on the voyage. … We have an ordnance man, don't we? I recall Thanos picking him up.'

'You recall correctly, sir.'

'Contact him, sooner rather than later. Tell him to fix up a bit of C-4 and a detonator and pack them both into a suitcase. Arrange to have the case delivered to Algrim; he'll be the one to take it onto the Rosamunde. I want him to detonate the charge in the ship's hold. … He'll need tickets. Buy one for the return journey, too.'

'The Rosamunde is an ocean liner?' Hall spoke as if he had not quite heard; as if he was waiting for Loki to tell him that he had failed utterly to comprehend his meaning, that in fact Loki had meant something different to what Hall imagined.

Loki snapped a spritz cookie between his front teeth. 'The hold will be stuffed full of Vanir munitions,' he said, after he had chewed and swallowed. 'Technically against the rules of war, but the Vanir won't risk leaving themselves unarmed. We'll leak the Rosamunde's route and manifest to Jotunheim, and after the thing is done Malekith will happen to discover it had been leaked. All fingers will point to Jotunheim, Vanaheim will consider it a _c_ _asus belli_ , Asgard will be obligated to hop in after Vanaheim, and there we are...'

'The charge will be detonated'—Hall, poor boy, cleared his throat—'in the hold containing the munitions. If I understand correctly.'

'Dear me. Are you having a crisis of faith, Hall? … Would you like a rosette?'

Hall looked like a boy who had walked in on his father flushing his goldfish, if the father was Prince of Asgard and the boy shied from offending him. He shook his head.

'Thank you, sir, no.' Shifting on his feet, glancing to the tray and then to the typewriter, Hall said, 'How many do you expect will...perish?'

'Oh, I don't know, how many people are on these sorts of ships? And the White Sea is warm this time of year; that ought to lower the count. Why do you ask? Do you mean to send their families condolences? If you do, don't. Dear Father will take care of it.'

Hall was silent for a long while. Then he said, 'I will have a piece of bread, sir, if you don't mind.' He stood still, his hands folded behind his back, waiting; he watched Loki's hands peel the paper from the typewriter, fold it and slip it into an envelope.

Once the envelope was sealed, Loki proffered the tray. At the same time a breeze passed through the open windows, fluttering the edges of the papers on the desk, nudging the envelope, touching a chill to the back of Loki's neck.

 

* * *

 

There was, in the end, one last good day.

Before the first dinner of the last week-end of the Valhalla season, Thor slipped into Loki's bedroom. He was half unsealed from his evening costume: his waistcoat was unbuttoned, and the ends of his tie hung down his shirt-front. To Loki, who was fastening his cufflinks, he said, 'Get out of those things, and let's go up to the mountains.'

'We've a dinner, haven't we,' Loki said.

'Damn the dinner!' There was a split in Thor's voice. He was in motion, he was tired, he was surrounded, he was alone. He had received Lady Sif, that afternoon, and now returned to Loki; he was bound.

'Yes,' said Loki, 'let's.'

So they tore each other out of their tailcoats and slid into their seersucker, and told Frigga to tell their guests that they had taken ill. Another day, she might have chastised them. Because the air was so warm, she stood on her toes to kiss their foreheads, then told them, 'Don't be too long—Thor, you've a meeting in the morning. And don't be too terribly raucous.'

It was three hours' journey from Valhalla to their summer cottage. Though they were the dinner hours, the sky was bright as midafternoon; Loki drew down the top of his Jaguar roadster and drove singing, smoking, speeding northwards. They had shoved off their guards, so were alone, apart from their other selves. The man who had rolled his shirt-sleeves to show tanned forearms, who spit out strands of his wind-swept hair, was only Loki's brother; he was only the one who adored Loki, and leaned in to press a kiss to Loki's jaw.

Loki was—what was he, here? Regressed; set back into the body of the boy who could do such a thing as take joy in the world. He felt, with the press of the wind around the curves of the mountains, that his rottener skins sloughed off, and all sensation touched the core of him. God, how bright the sun, how warm the air. Summer, and his brother beside him! He was so hysterically pleased that he swerved the car when leaning in to kiss Thor, and only laughed to see that he had nearly driven off the narrow mountain road.

Craning his neck to peer at the twirling of tyre tracks in the road behind them, Thor cried, 'For Christ's sake, Loki!'

'Do you really believe,' Loki said, driving on, 'that I would have let us die? First of all I'm a better driver than the sort who go careening down the sides of mountains—'

Thor—soaked in sun, the shadows of the tall rocks slipping over him—looked at Loki as though they were tumbling down the slope of the mountain. The jolt seemed to have sapped everything from him but a flat, stunned awareness that there was nothing to be done. Thor did think Loki would have let them die.

Loki wanted to tell him, 'But I wouldn't have done it now. Tonight we love each other.' It was better that he didn't say it; and they were slowing to a stop before the groundskeeper's cottage, startling the man out of the garden he tended.

The house had been shut up, and opened to them only slowly. Inside, the air was cool and flat, and smelt of wood polish; watery sunlight spilt through the slats of the shutters, lighting the dust which rose from the mounds of shrouded furniture. As the groundskeeper opened the shutters and unlatched the casement windows, the warmth of the summer washed through, stirring the linen over the furniture, whirling the dust-motes and the cobwebs.

'How many years has it been?' Thor asked, trailing his fingers along the wallpaper.

Loki felt a slip of memory—sun in the front room, face against fabric, cool water, limbs swim-sore—and said, 'I must have been seventeen the very last time. … Oh, seven years, then?'

Their voices echoed through the corridors, against the clean, white wallpaper; their footsteps pattered against the hardwood. They chased each other down the length of the central corridor, then turned into what had been their bedroom, in which there were books of Loki's still on his shelf, and boy's magazines still piled into the drawers of the table by Thor's bed. The two twin beds, stripped of linen, were so small that Thor and Loki wondered how they had ever slept in them. Years ago they had mapped these rooms according to the key of their young bodies; now they were tall, broad, and felt as Titans, liable to crush the house under their toes. They stepped lightly.

To be alone, they sent the groundskeeper into town to buy fresh fruits and bread. They flung open the windows in their bedroom; with sun and birdsong and breeze through the windows, they curled together on what had been Thor's bed, and pulled the clothes from each other. For a long while they sunned themselves, twined and sweat-damp, teasing kisses from smiling mouths, clutching close to keep from falling off the bed.

'Isn't it enormously funny,' Loki said. 'By now it would be the cheese course. We would both be trying desperately to be drunk.'

'Hadn't you wanted to stay,' Thor murmured, kissing along Loki's jaw, pulling his fingers through the length of Loki's hair.

'Don't let's think of it any longer. We'll think of dinners when we're dining; now we're kissing.'

Presently they were not kissing; they were hiding their faces in each other's shoulders, reaching between the press of their hot bodies to pull at each other's cocks. It had, more than the feeling of fucking, the feeling of a long embrace—safe, soft, the both of them sealed into the pocket of this evening. They watched each other as they spent: Loki saw Thor frowning with effort, lashes fluttering, lips parted in a mounting 'Ah, ah.' Eyes so open, so brightly blue, that Loki forgot for a moment they were only parts of Thor's body; they seemed heavy, tiny nebulae brought out from far space.

They dried off with Thor's vest, which they then flung to the floor; they stepped into their trousers, made an attempt at buttoning their shirts, and wandered out of doors, down to the stretch of grass before the water. In the stone pit, they built a fire. Thor hefted logs from the woodshed over his shoulder, and Loki knelt by the pit and eased a match-flame into the pile of kindling. Tenderly, he coaxed the flame to spreading. He whispered, 'There you are, there you are,' and a long lick of flame caught to a log, and soon the fire was tall.

'There would have always been another war,' Thor said, when they were lying together on the grass by the fire. They had been eating the bread and butter the groundskeeper had delivered, and gulping down wine from the bottle. 'I gather it was only that we didn't see it, when we were younger. I wonder, did Mother and Father know.'

'They hoped for peace,' said Loki, swallowing a mouthful of wine. 'These things always do work against hope.'

'I'm glad I didn't know, before; I can't bear waiting for it to happen. It's bloody of me, isn't it? I oughtn't to want to send all of the men I'd known at Idavoll to war. To say that I'm sick of waiting for it would be as good as saying I'm sick of waiting for them to go off to die.'

'Put them in administrative posts; they'll spend the whole of the war behind the lines.'

'None of them were that sort.'

Thor took the bottle from Loki and drew strongly from it; the apple of his throat bobbed, and Loki leaned in to kiss it. Sputtering, setting aside the bottle, Thor rolled into Loki, took his neck in his hand, and pressed a wet, vindictive splash of a kiss to the side of Loki's mouth. When Loki licked his lips, afterwards, he tasted the wine and Thor's mouth both.

'But it's true,' Thor said, solemn again. 'I liked them because they were the sort who minded less about themselves than about...'

'Goodness?'

'Not as an ideal. Useful goodness, I suppose. They wouldn't fight against the Jötnar because they wanted to be good; it's only that...'

'Fighting against the Jötnar would be to do good, and they want to do good. It's a subtle difference.'

'When I was at Idavoll I always imagined that if there were a war, I would fight alongside all the others. It was damned stupid of me. They all knew I wasn't like them.'

'Why does it bother you, being unlike them? You're the crown prince; they're clever, bourgeois cannon-fodder. There's a good reason everyone minds about keeping you alive.'

'It feels...' Thor crept his fingers through Loki's. He said, not louder than the crackle of the fire, 'It feels as though to be the crown prince means I won't ever be simply a good man.'

Quiet; the overlapping of a hundred birds chittering and whirring, the firm thrum of crickets, the stirring of breeze through the blooming heather. The amber sunlight, the clouds and sky, wavered glassily in the water. Sparks spurted from the fire; ash floated outwards and settled into the grass.

'Is it not enough to love,' said Loki blandly.

'You'd not have agreed if I had said so.'

'No,' said Loki, 'I doubt I would have done.'

In the red half-light of the darkest hour, Thor and Loki turned towards each other; they unwrapped each other from their clothes, again, and with their skin pressed into the grass, they touched each other's bare bodies, feeling out the measure and the movement of them.

Thor was—oh, oh, help him, Thor was a good man, how could he be anything else. The waves of hair falling past Thor's shoulders, the pale hair rolling along his forearms, the scruff of curls at the center of his chest, were all illumined. The long sunlit drive had burnt patches of pink along his nose, cheeks, the back of his neck; Loki touched these places till Thor was squinting in pain.

Pressing kisses to the spread of raw skin along Thor's shoulder, Loki said, 'It's all right...'

He remembered this. He kissed his brother's mouth, too. He told his brother to lie back, and he sat in his brother's lap and took his brother's stiffening cock in hand. With one hand he tugged along Thor's shaft; with the other he smoothed along the crease of Thor's mouth, pressing between his parting lips. Thor took two fingers onto his tongue, and gave deep, wet, pulsing licks with the flat of it. He worked at Loki's fingers so tenderly that Loki felt his cock dripping untouched; his innards burnt bright as liquid steel, glowing through his skin. Hot fright and pain incomprehensible, till he wanted only for that pleasure to be out of him. The prophecy had been wrong; it was not all right; it hurt.

Thor was rocking his hips into Loki's touch, teasing his tongue-tip along the pads of Loki's fingers, reaching past his cock to rub loosely, graspingly, at Loki's own. In gasps propelled into the space between Thor's touches, Loki said, 'I want for you to remember this.'

Hazily, Thor nodded. It was not enough, and Loki felt desperation strike through him, as if he had lost his balance and was spilling down the face of some godly mountain. If he was falling, it was all he could do to hold his thighs at Thor's hips, struggle towards finish, and say to Thor, 'Remember this—I mean it, brother—remember this.'

When Thor was turning, shifting beneath the grasp of his thighs, throat-deep moans thrumming through their two bodies, Loki took his fingers from Thor's mouth and said, 'Promise you will. …Thor! Promise me!'

Thor looked up towards Loki, and Loki saw in his brother's face a sadness so fathomless it seemed a sort of space-like sea. There was something in Thor which Loki did not understand.

He was spending; Loki, too; what did it matter. They were falling, also, and Thor said 'I promise' at the same time Loki said 'I'm sorry.'

Loki rolled off of Thor and onto his back; the world seemed to come underneath him again, round and solid, easing up against his bones. The grass scratched beneath his shoulder blades. Not long till the sky would brighten again. The birds, the crickets, were chittering on; the low sun was rolling through the mists of the mountains. Motes of ash hung as stars in the damp air, adorned sometimes by a comet of a live spark. The water lay flat and still.

'I think I'd like to have a swim,' Loki said. He rose on weak legs, setting slowly on his journey. Soon he heard the rustle of the grass beneath another set of footsteps, and saw Thor's shadow stretching towards the water.

 

* * *

 

By the morning, the breeze blew strongly. Thor and Loki, in the clothes they had worn the day before, sat on the edge of the deck of the cottage and ate a breakfast of fresh plums and raspberries. Neither of them had slept; they moved dumbly, staring into the shadow-patterns the swaying aspen cast over the deck. Their peace was finished, but to begin the journey back to Valhalla would be to make their surrender; so they ate too many raspberries, and spoke of nothing.

Then Thor, who had seemed for the whole morning to be holding something sour in his mouth, said, 'Loki, I ought to tell you now.'

Loki took a bite of his plum, and Thor said, 'I mean to marry Lady Sif.'

The moment after the moment he said it was not any different to the moment before. Loki was aware that Thor had spoken... The shadows were still blurring across the deck, and the plum was still sweet on his tongue, and he was still stupid with tiredness. He thought that because it was not real to him then, it would not ever be real.

Thor said, 'I brought Father round to it just last week. I don't know that he's happy, but he thinks it can be done... I imagine now he's frightened for himself, and only wants me to find some woman, and Sif is fine enough considering, but I do love her. Father wants to see me wed, doesn't he, but—'

'Oh, shut up,' Loki spat. 'Do you think I give a damn whose filthy quim you stuff your cock in. Go on, do what is wanted of you. Pledge yourself to her. Make her your crown princess. Make her your queen. Make her feel as though she's deserved it. Let her kiss you. Let her look at you in the way she does... Loving. Let her love you. Let her think she loves you. She will think it; it isn't that she wants to be the queen, no, she loves you, she thinks. She would have you if you were a fisherman.'

'Isn't that the meaning of it,' Thor said. 'To love each other regardless.'

'I don't know; why don't you find it out for yourself. Tell her about rubbing me off in the woodshed. Tell her about the time you had my cock so deep in your throat it made you hoarse the day after. Slide your hand under her wedding garter and tell her you like how my arse tastes.'

Loki felt himself lurch forth. Thor's fingers had wrinkled into the front of his shirt, Thor had dragged him close, Thor was pressing his forehead against Loki's and hissing, in a hot burst of breath, 'Don't dare.'

'Tell her,' Loki whispered, 'that when you fuck me you say, _Brother, brother, I love you, brother._ '

A lightning-strike split direct into his skull. Thor had struck his own head against Loki's; the blow came as swift and staggering as if it had been an ingot of lead, crushing against bone, tossing him down against the deck. He saw, very close to his eyes, the grain of the deck planks; the wood was stained with globules of dark, syrupy blood, which he found dripped from his throbbing nose.

Thor was on top of him; Thor was pulling him up by the hair, so that he could do nothing but look at him. 'Let me alone,' Thor was saying. 'If you love me, let me alone!'

Spots swam through the sky, or through the inside of Loki's skull. Blood trickled into the back of his throat; he retched, he spat, he drooled onto his chin. When Thor shook him—Thor was saying, 'Let me alone, for God's sake, let me alone, I can do _nothing_ '—a spurt of fresh blood slid down his upper lip, into the line of his mouth.

'If you can love me regardless,' Loki said, tasting copper at his tongue, 'she can love you regardless, can't she. Or do you not love me regardless.'

'I do,' Thor said, 'and I'm damned for it.'

He disentangled, stood, and Loki's head dropped to the deck; when Thor's shadow peeled off of him, he saw only sky, the aspen, the tops of the mountains.

The plum had dropped off of the deck and into the grass below. There it lay half-eaten, ripe, set upon by insects. Loki smelt and tasted only blood, full in the front of his swelling face. He raised his fingertips to his nose and pressed softly against the side of it; he found that with each nudge of his fingers, a stream of blood pulsed from the broken vein, rolling along the front of his upturned face, pulling an answering arousal through his gut.

By the time that Thor returned with a dampened handkerchief, Loki's cock was faintly, indifferently stiffening. Thor looked only at his face, likely stirred by a sympathetic tingle through his own nose.

'Get up,' Thor said, 'or you'll swallow blood. It's better to be upright.'

'I beg to differ,' Loki muttered; he had meant it as a dry aside, but blood and saliva bubbled in the back of his throat, giving him the gurgle of some low beast. He sat up, and grimaced through the sudden washing-out of blood.

Kneeling beside Loki, Thor raised the handkerchief; Loki put a hand at Thor's wrist, and smiled grimly up at him.

'God,' he said, 'but it must feel good to see me brought low again, after all this time. You were waiting for this.'

'I wasn't,' Thor said, 'and it doesn't,' and he made another attempt with the handkerchief.

Anchoring himself at Thor's wrist, Loki pulled himself close, taking long, dull, stopped-up breaths, blowing them hotly against Thor's face. He tightened his fingers, and he said, 'I give you my blessing, brother.'

Then he struck Thor with a kiss, sharp as a counter-blow; he licked his tongue along Thor's teeth till Thor opened for him, and he gathered a lick of blood from the back of his throat and let it roll along his tongue, spilling into Thor's mouth, spreading bitterly along the seal of their lips. Sparks scattered across the insides of his eyelids—he could not breathe through his nose, so had not been breathing—and he pulled away, taking air through his teeth. He saw, in the dappled shade, that Thor's face was painted over with strokes of plum-like blood, as if Thor had buried his face in a carcass and bit ravenously.

'Really, though,' Loki said, wiping his own face with his sleeve, 'I don't so much mind.'

'I'm sorry,' Thor said.

'For what?'

Thor only dabbed his handkerchief at Loki's face, patting away the color. He worked along his upper lip, pressed into the creases at the sides of his mouth, swiped firmly at his chin. Loki thought—though he laughed at himself for thinking it—that Thor had the manner of an honest father, tending to the little wounds of a little child. He lifted his face to the sun, pinched his nose shut, and let Thor kiss his temple.

 

* * *

 

Swinging in from the north in the Jaguar, their seersucker dirt-stained and their sunburnt skin peeling, Loki and Thor felt rather like a pair of bandits swooping onto the grand stage of central Valhalla, upending the silk-and-pearl people from their box-seats, smearing the velvet drapes in filth.

'Let's go in through the front gates,' Loki said, flicking his cigarette over the driver's side door and into the quick-passing street.

'They'll all know,' Thor told him, 'that we hadn't taken tragically ill before the dinner.'

'Well,' Loki said, 'don't they deserve to know it?'

Thor would announce his engagement sometime in the next several months. Loki did not know if Thor had asked Lady Sif herself, but the asking mattered little. She would do what he liked, and he liked the thought of marrying her. Well, Loki would do what he himself liked; and that day he liked to show Lady Sif that Thor was yet his brother's. Thor could have taken her, the night before, on a chaperoned stroll through the gardens, where he would have sat her down by the fountains and kissed her hands and wrists. What had he done? Lady Sif would never know, beyond that it ended in a pressman's snap of the two princes straggling through the gates of the palace.

There were more press than was ordinary, Loki saw, as they passed down the lengthy, leafy line towards the palace; they seemed to have gathered by the gates, where the browns of their hats and jackets made them appear a pile of leaves, swept up and waiting to be discarded.

'What have they all come out for?' Thor asked.

Loki's first thought, like the prod of a cold finger into the underside of his stomach, was that the war had got set off, somehow, before he had quite anticipated. It couldn't be that; there would have a been a newsboy on every street corner in Valhalla, cupping his hand to his mouth and yodelling, as a stop-gap before the evening papers, 'War declared against Jotunheim! War declared!' To think of it pulled a thrill through him that was perhaps pleasant, perhaps unsettling.

As the car drew nearer the gates, the pile of hats rippled through with their perking up, their turning; the black beads of the eyes of their cameras rolled and winked in sun. Beneath the thudding motor, the judder of tyres against brick, rose the monstrous crackling of several dozen men all shouting out at once.

'Your Royal Highness,' they cried, for of course they wanted Thor; but they were saying, too, 'Give us word on your father's condition! — Will he be declared incapacitated, Your Royal Highness? — Will he take visitors, Your Royal Highness?'

'What can they mean?' Turning to Loki, not quite believing, he said, 'He hasn't been poorly...'

'They mean,' Loki said, 'that something has happened.'

The gates swung open. Loki pressed the flat of his foot to the pedal and felt the car lurch forward, flicking away the pressmen; time seemed to have dragged long, so that they were moving interminably through the holding-chamber of the front drive, where the summer-ripe trees and the spraying fountains and the clean-clipped grass were held still, sustained. Loki's palms were wet, slipping against the leather of the steering wheel; beside him Thor was demanding he turn round and drive to hospital.

'Don't be ridiculous,' Loki said. His own words hummed dimly through him. Of his father, Thor's father, he thought nothing. 'We're not wanted, there. It would be a waste of our time. No, we've got to see Mummy.'

An enfilade speared a line direct through the centre of the palace; Thor and Loki entered at the western face, into the sun-over-snow of the outer rooms, and stepped through the succession of suites, cutting in towards the residence. Attendants swung open each set of double doors, drawing them past the damask and marble of the state rooms, past Italian pictures and bronze figures and longcase clocks, which seemed to have no purpose but to put Loki's frenzy into high relief. Something was happening—did the palace not know it? He felt as if he were splashing through still water.

With a final bow of the attendants, a final swinging-in of doors, they breached the border of the residence, where splendor gave abruptly into plainness. The doors to Frigga's sitting room stood open, and from between them she emerged, her hair loose over her shoulders, her face void of all but the inexpressible. She clasped them both to her.

To be held by her, then, set Loki's skin to pulsing, throbbing uneasily into itself. His body rejected hers: not out of antipathy towards her, but out of fear that he should appear to feel moved by this great, ugly sentiment. The whole of Asgard would work itself to a froth over Odin's troubles. Loki was only numb; beneath the confusion, his mind sparkled through the circuitry of plans and chances.

Frigga then perceived the brown stains dribbling down the front of Loki's shirt, the smear of staining along his sleeve, the dark flecks crusted about his nose. Taking his jaw in her hand, she said, 'What have you done to yourself?'

She was not forgiving him; she did not stroke along the side of his face, take him into her arms, kiss his cheek and tell him that all was well, all was well, who hurt you and I will kiss it all better. Her fingers pressed spots of bright pain to his jaw; she was sharp and clear, her brows striking in towards the furrow between her eyes.

'I fell,' Loki muttered, as Thor said, 'It was me; I hit him.'

Frigga stepped back from them, taking them both into her view; she gave them the full rush of her fury, tall and astounding, a convocation of eagles lifting out from the rocks.

'You are grown men,' she said. 'You are grown, you are not children, you are not free as children. You are grown; your father has taken gravely ill, we fear the worst, and there will be a war—and you are leaving Valhalla to go God knows where—you are fighting with each other—you are spilling each other's blood... This is not the time! For a quarter of a century I have raised you—I have given you your carefree summers, I wanted you to have them while you might have done—I taught you what I knew in hopes that when the world fell to crisis you would meet it. You have not met it. You must.'

Thor blustered, went red-faced, said, 'If it had been any other night, it would have meant nothing! You knew it yourself, when you bade us go!' But any vigor in his voice crumbled into the pit of his guilt, and he stood penitent before his mother, who stood penitent before him.

'I ought not to have lied for you,' she said, reaching her hand up to sweep through Thor's hair, to comb her fingers through windswept tangles. To him she was fond, despite herself; to his cheek she let the palm of her hand linger. Then she let him loose. 'It was wrong of me. I thought that it would not matter. … No.'

She began to tell them about what had happened to Odin.

As she spoke, Loki became aware of the echo of their steps, clicking and shuffling against the parquetry: Thor pacing, stamping his foot, Frigga shifting her weight, turning away, turning back. In the glossy parquetry, like reflection in still water, floated the shadows of the tables and vases and figurines before the windows, the soft lines of the sheer under-curtains. Midday was ceding to afternoon, rounding out the light, paling the shadows to a dusty blue.

Loki saw the corridor through the eye of his memory: he saw himself small, tumbling along the floor, wondering what they would eat for supper and would Thor want to play. He supposed in future he would see this sort of light, this shadow, this quality of air, and think of the time he was twenty-five, knew nothing of life, and returned from the mountains to learn that his father would not see the winter. His heart, Frigga was telling them... How like Thor's father to have a troublesome heart.

'I'll be a moment.' He turned on his heel, towards the door which opened onto the central corridor of the residence. Thor made to follow him, and he shook him off, saying, 'No, I'm only washing up. Stay with Mother.'

As he entered the corridor he heard the muttering voices of his mother and brother, muddled into each other, playing fluidly through the doorways, along the walls, against the window-glass. No words any clearer than the others; there was a ringing in Loki's head.

 

* * *

 

Hall tried to insist that he have a bowl of hot water and a washcloth sent up. 'And then I'll call for a doctor, sir. You'll be better off for having been seen to. It looks swollen, if I may say.'

'No,' Loki said, giving a grand, dismissive sweep of the hand, and—ah, he was dizzy, the room blurred; he braced his hand against the glass front of one of his bookcase, pressing a palm-print into it. Exhaustion had leapt up from behind him, dragged him into the mire. He felt nothing but faint impressions of the world without, and the cold bar of fear which moved him from within. 'There are matters more pressing—listen to me!'

'I am, sir.'

'Ring up Algrim and tell him I've called Rosamunde off. It isn't the time. It can't be done, now. I'll tell them when, but it isn't...' He waved his hand, tilted his head, gesturing towards the words he intended. 'Now.'

There was a soft, thin whistling in the room; he thought it was a draught, and nearly told Hall to shut the damned window. Slowly he realized that he was hearing himself breathing through his teeth. He wiped the back of his hand through the sweat on his brow, where locks of his hair clung wetly to his temples, letting out the salt-scent of the fjord.

When Hall said nothing, Loki smacked his dampened palm against the bookcase, rattling the glass in its frame. 'Do it!' he cried.

'Sir,' said Hall, 'I can't. I mean I _cannot_ send the message—sir, the Rosamunde will put out to sea in a half hour. A message through our channels is two hours to deliver when all is in order; in the best of cases we'd not have half enough time. Your Highness, it's as good as finished. … I thought,' he ventured, 'that that was what you had wanted. To have it done. Sir.'

Like a bawling terror of a child, small and senseless to all but his own lacking, Loki curled his hands into fists, worked his blood up to his face, and cried, 'I don't want it any longer!'

'I'm sorry,' Hall said, no longer an attendant but a fellow again, looking Loki in the eye, setting himself steady against the furnace-blast of Loki's fury. 'I've done all you've told me to do.'

'You've not!' Loki spat. He curled his fingers into Hall's lapel and shook him, drew him up so that they were nose-to-nose, breathing against each other, baring their teeth. 'You were always the useless one, out of all of us—poor little Hall, who hated his awful Papa so much that he ran half a world away from him—poor little Hall, who was so—besotted with his darling prince that he would eat out of his palm, sad to see him think he's a man in his own right, as if he isn't more than a little Pekingese nipping at his master's heels—'

Hall shook him off, then struck him. The back of his hand snapped against Loki's cheek, scraping sharply through the nerves. 'I'm sorry!' he said, but did not cower, or puddle; only stood, inflamed, a rare heat in the grey of his eyes.

Pain pulled a sheet of calm across Loki. He returned to the remnants of his senses. He swept his hair back from his face; he rubbed his fingers over the throb of Hall's handprint, bringing the pinprickling pain to the surface of his skin.

'That's the second time today,' he said, 'that someone has struck me. … It's the second time today that someone has told me they're sorry. For what, I always wonder, and no one seems to be able to say.'

'I meant that I'm sorry,' Hall said, 'for not being as useful as I might have been.'

'Not for striking me?'

'No, sir,' he said.

As if giving up a last, dry working of the throat before expiring, Loki laughed. The walls were dripping, the carpet pooling. The world was bursting in his palm, oozing from between his fingers. He pulled through the muck of it, searching for what he needed, finding only diffuse memories: the sunset through the Venetian blinds in Odin's room in hospital, years ago, when he had had a milder attack—the glass globe of Odin's paperweight, holding inside it a strange planet of reflection, gloomily blue with the falling rain—gobs of pink blossoms passing beyond the window, beyond Odin sitting stately at the head of the table—and yet Loki did not know him, this man who had been his father. Each single image of him gathered into a mass, formless, creating no self, filling in no silhouette. A man was dying—who?

No, the question was, _A war was starting—why?_ Because of the man who was dying, and never mind who he was.

'I want a cigarette,' Loki said.

Hall scurried to fetch him one. He placed it between Loki's lips, struck the match, held the flame to the tip, and waited for Loki to inhale—so Loki, half in apology to Hall, took a breath. The world brightened, softened, went dizzier yet. Hall shook out the match.

'Damn it all,' Loki said, 'it is done.' A plume of smoke tumbled from his nose and mouth. '—Or it might not go off, after all. It could be that the sea is rough. Trouble with the engines. They might stay at port.'

'Perhaps,' said Hall, meaning that really it was done, damn it all.

 

* * *

 

On the table by the window, a clear, square vase gave out an elegant unfolding of a dozen lilies. The stems were newly cut, green, magnified in the fresh, cool water. Flowing faintly through the curtains, sunlight moved into the glass.

The air was close; the door had long since been shut. Beyond it, a guard stood watch. Loki stood at the threshold of the hospital room, feeling for all the world that he was the crumbled, struggling thing, begging pity for itself. Odin seemed a marble figure atop a tomb; he lay with his head propped up on a pile of pillows, his white hair brushed soft against the white linen, his white hands folded over his stomach. His patch had been taken off, so that his scarring regarded Loki as keenly as his eye did.

'Your mother has told me,' he said, 'that you and Thor took something of a journey, last evening. … To where, I wonder? Where could you have wanted to go?'

'To the mountains,' Loki said. 'One of our summer places.'

After silence, Odin asked, 'Which of you was it, who asked the other to go with him?'

'It was Thor.'

Odin's face told Loki nothing: neither if he believed him nor if he really minded who it had been. It seemed almost the sort of absent-minded question one would ask a guest at a dinner party; but it hurt Odin to speak, didn't it? His brow was creased, his lips drawn thin.

'I do not know,' Odin said, 'the impulse to run from obligation. Thor has always had his obligation; he has always run from it, towards pleasure. Towards his desires. Which are not his duties. … They decommissioned the Hlidskjalf, when my war ended. I was spat onto shore, though I could scarce walk on it, and they scrapped her. For near five years I had lived in her. I felt nothing for Valhalla then; nothing for the land. It was false to me. I desired the sea. To care for my ship, to guide it. And to take it into battle, as I had done. Those were the duties I had known. … After the armistice there were parades. A summer in the mountains. Cakes and champagne. Quiet... The Hlidskjalf and I had given peace to Asgard. It is the cruellest thing I have done to myself. In my dreams she and I are at war. But Asgard had asked peace of me; that is all a country asks of its king. Peace and pleasure. I want, more than my own desires, the fulfilment of the desires of my people. … What of Thor, I have asked myself. What of Thor, who desires.'

'Who desires Lady Sif,' Loki said.

'Among other things. … He's told you, has he? They will have a long engagement. I doubt I shall see the end of it.'

Any speech of Odin's brought out from Loki the one unvarying denial. A swell of refusal lifted out of him, covered him, held him for the moment in the safety of an instinctive _It isn't so_ ; then the swell fell, spread itself thin, unveiled him, and it was so. But if not Odin, what would Loki run against, fling himself against? What strength would Loki fracture himself against? What, above all, would he loathe? Loki felt his brow furrow, his lip twitch; he felt his own emotion against his father's impassivity, and with it a hellish backwash of shame. He looked towards the lilies. The glass of the vase seemed to melt in sunlight, to seep into the glassy blue of the curtains. The light swam, the glass swam, the lilies swam.

'We'll win the war,' Loki said.

 _I know that,_ he imagined his father would say. _I trust in that, if anything._

'At what cost,' his father said. 'Of course a war in which you do not suffer—in which Thor does not suffer—seems to you a war which must be waged.'

'Mustn't it?' Loki looked at Odin, then; he curled his fists, stepped nearer him, bared his teeth at him. 'All those years of peace, your peace and pleasure—but it is not pleasure, and it surely is not peace. Every month we hear of another dozen killed, another bomb hidden in the bed of a lorry; it is war, only small war, only a dribbling of war. We seem fools for not stopping it. We seem dumb and pitiful and impotent. And the Jötnar see that, and they mean to spare us the indignity of letting ourselves be crushed out, one by one, like flies under a fat thumb. What of that suffering? Is that less than the suffering of war?'

'You know it is less.'

In a thunder-strike: 'I do not know it!' … He had sounded so much like Thor, then, or like Odin himself. Hardened in the heat of his feeling, shutting iron over the twitches and tells of his face, he stepped nearer yet. 'You could name a thousand men who died in the war, couldn't you? Yes, you honor them; you etch their names into plaques. What of the ones who died at the hands of the Jötnar, years after you had the—mercy—to declare peace?'

'Death is a constant—'

'If you had really won the last war, would my mother not live?'

'If Asgard wages another war,' Odin asked, 'will your mother live?'

With a scuff of leather at tile, Loki took a long step back, as if putting distance between himself and some snarling beast. His eyes were narrowed; his throat, his face, the channels of his heart all burnt bitterly. Was he a man, after all? A hundred eighty centimeters and thirteen stone, and he felt he crawled along the floor, helpless, grasping towards light and vague faces. His eyes stung. It occurred to him—had he not thought it, before?—that if Odin had killed all of the Jötnar, Loki would be nothing. Not a babe, not a midge.

Or perhaps his soul would have been poured into the body of Odin's blood-child. If he had been the true son of Odin, he would hardly have minded whether some greedy, grasping Jotun lived or died. The true son of Odin would say, _They ought to be put down._

'Is it not what Asgard asks of you,' Loki said, 'to stop its enemies from acting as enemies? They have got a standing army twice the size of the army you fought; they have got fleets of ships, fleets of aircraft, weapons the likes of which you've never seen. They will hurt us, Father. They will hurt your people, and if you refuse to wage war on them, your people will ask you, _Why do you let us suffer? Why do you let them hurt us? Why had you not stopped them during the last war?_ '

'As long as I live,' Odin said, 'I will do my damnedest to stop the war. That means very little now. Thor will be king. What will he do? I suspect you know.'

'Thor has always held you as an idol, you as a god before all other gods. When he is king he will be the king his father was. His father was strong and brave and fought against the Jötnar; he will be strong and brave and fight against the Jötnar. Perhaps he will be stronger, braver yet. Perhaps he will fight better yet.'

'And what...pray tell, will you be? What praises will they sing of you—when you lie withered and dying?'

Some voice other than Loki's, some issuing from the aether, rang against the inside of his skull: _Nothing, won't it be?_ Loki did not know why he heard it; he knew well what they would sing. They would sing that he was clever, that he was quick, that he stood beside his brother, that he and his brother together put down the Jötnar, that the both of them were good, true, noble sons of Odin. The singers of praises would know nothing of him, and so they would sing well of him. When he lay withered and dying, clutching a skeletal hand to the musty linen, smacking a toothless mouth in imitation of his silver-speech, all of Asgard would kneel at the foot of his bed and wail, _Prince Loki the good, Prince Loki_... And in singing so, they would make it so. And so it did not matter, really, what he was.

Certainly it would matter little to Odin, he on his heaven-throne. He would only find it out when Thor drifted upwards and said, 'Oh, but Loki's gone to the other place.' The two of them would have ever so many thousands of years to reconcile themselves to Loki's badness. Meanwhile, Loki would be forever gnawed upon, he supposed, like Cassius and Brutus and Judas.

Or perhaps, in the end, nothing. Still ringing: _nothing._ And the thin rattle of Odin's breath was ringing through his chest.

'I will be my father's son,' Loki said.

'Will you,' Odin murmured; but his eye was flat. He meant, _You will._ (Did he not?)

'If not'—then a dryness in Loki's throat, a guttural thrum of a catch; swallow, wet lips, speak—'the son who was loved.'

The marble of the tomb-sculpture faded out of Odin. He was left a piece of flesh, small when held against greater things, colorless and brittle. He was rotting alive; no crown could move his blood through him. Still he swept his tongue over his lips, opened his mouth, breathed, did not speak, breathed.

Then, just when the glaze had settled over Loki's eyes, he did speak.

'I thought,' he said, 'that when I took you into my care, I had saved you. Perhaps bodily. … Your spirit, no.'

Loki's heart was only the cold sea. In his fingers, in his toes, cold tributaries; in his wrists, elbows, ankles, knees, cold deltas. His body was only black water. With such a body he knelt to the floor, and clasped Odin's hands in his own cold hands, and felt the pulsing of Odin's heart. He rubbed his fingers over the wrinkles and spots of the backs of Odin's hands, the swollen knobs of Odin's knuckles. Veins struck out along his hands, his wrists; Loki wondered what his blood looked like, if it would spill darkly when loosed from the body. Spilling anyway were—tears, hot as blood if not blood itself, but from Loki's eyes.

'Live,' Loki pleaded, 'and watch us surpass you.'

'You know better.' Faintly, Odin shook his head; tendrils of his hair brushed along his shoulders, along the soft fabric of his hospital gown. He withdrew his hands from Loki's, and with a flick of his fingers bade Loki stand.

Loki did not stand. With his hands on the linen, he said, 'Don't you like it? Are you not proud? … Of what you've made. This.'

'No,' Odin said. That was all. The expanse of feeling, all the thin tremulous variegations of love and hurt between son and father, prince and king, drew inwards, narrowing, till there was only the pinpoint of the word. Odin gestured towards the door.

Loki said, ' _Yes._ ' He clutched Odin's hand in his shuddering fingers; he bent near to Odin, so that Odin could feel his breath stirring the air between them. 'I am your son; you made me.'

Then he rose, smoothed out his shirt, lifted his jaw, turned his back to his father and passed through the door, shutting it behind him.

In the corridor, white tile glowed blue in twilight; Loki saw through the windows that rain bubbled over the flagstone of the central courtyard. Beyond the barrier of Odin's guards stood Prime Minister Heimdall, the Chief of War, and the Chief of Intelligence, all hollow-eyed and suits rumpled, smelling of whisky and long sleeplessness. They bowed, when they saw Loki, but only perfunctorily. After he passed them, he heard the click of footsteps against tile, then the swinging-open of the door he had shut.

 

* * *

 

Supper, taken at the low table of Frigga's sitting room, was a meagre meal. Spread along the tablecloth, scarcely touched, were bowls of cod chowder, boards of smoked cheese and caraway crackers, cups of fruit tea. Between Thor's spoon and the teapot sat the evening edition of the _Daily Moon,_ which shouted out a picture of the princes in the Jaguar, faces blurred in cheap newsprint, underscored by block letters spelling  CROWN PRINCE FIDDLES WHILE ROME BURNS.

Loki picked flakes of varnish from his fingernails; Frigga stirred through her soup. Thor looked into the reflection of lamplight in his glass, but gave constant, compulsive glances towards the newspaper, twitching his fingers where they clutched to his napkin, till at last he rose from the table, knocking his chair backwards, crumpling the paper in his fists and tearing it through. The scraps of it scattered over his bowl, his cup, his plate, the space of floor between the table and the overturned chair. His face had gone dark; his nostrils flared; he said nothing. His eyes gleamed as if his mind worked towards speech, but his mouth only pressed flat, void and incapable.

'God damn it,' Thor said finally, giving a kick to the felled chair.

Frigga rose to take his arm. 'It only matters,' she said, 'that you do what you ought to do. The rest is—not so immediate, now.'

'But I haven't done what I ought to do,' he said. 'You know it better than anyone. Are you not ashamed of me?'

'I could not be ashamed of you,' she told him. 'I wish for you to be as wise and good as you might. And if you have resolved to be, I am proud.'

At the table, pouring himself a second cup, Loki clattered the teapot. Thor looked at him as if he had done something incomprehensible, neither awful nor benign. Frigga looked at him as if he had done something cruel. She held her hand, still, at Thor's arm.

'Why don't we walk in the gardens?' She looked at Loki, too. 'That's the thing for an unsettled mind.'

So she led her boys through the gardens: they passed through the honey-scent, the honey-light, which seemed, in the face of such a frightening outer world, to be soft and enveloping as a bath. The three of them had not gone together to the gardens for an age. The last time had been during the year Thor and Loki first had each other. Loki was awed that there had ever been a time when his brother was only his brother, that there had ever been a time when they walked with their mother and were free, light-hearted, keeping no secrets from her but the secret of who had overturned her jar of biscuits, who had pulled the feathers from her fan. The give of the soil and the sun through the leaves—all that feverish beauty—twitched inside of Loki, like a warm living thing tucked into his guts. And his mother and brother were in pain.

'If I had known,' Thor said—he and Loki sat together at a bench by the fish pond, where the water gurgled— 'I wouldn't have asked you to go away. Now that I know, I regret it. But I was happy for it, as it was. I liked to be with you. I wish we could have had more of that sort of day. I wish that he had come with us to the mountains, and Mother too.'

'What's the use of wishing it,' Loki said. 'There are a million things we've not done. What of the life in which it was all always wonderful? Oh, the swimming and the fruit and the bonfires and watching the stars. Alas, alas. … It wouldn't be our life.'

'A better one than ours,' Thor said. 'You do want a better one; you're always talking about what you want.'

'Not so sentimentally as you. God, that speech on midsummer's. Like honey and dates.'

'You have sentiment. Somewhere.'

Perhaps it was sentiment which compelled Loki, upon being faced with Thor's parted lips, Thor's blue eyes, to think of kissing him, to desire to kiss him. If a kiss were only a vile spitting-up of cruelty—the blood-kiss had been so—Loki would not have minded; but there was some loveliness in kissing Thor, some echo of past safety, which threatened to corrode Loki's will. What if? Swimming and fruit and bonfires, no blood but dark wine, kisses, no secrets, no love but their own. Alas, alas, indeed. Loki scoffed at the thought because he was frightened of letting it settle, seep.

He did not kiss Thor, then. If he could ever love Thor in the way Thor wanted, it would be after he had made himself worthy. He would not be worthy for a while. When they had won the war, perhaps.

Thor said, anyway, 'I'm sure it pains you, pretending to have forgone your own heart. Having everyone think you're fathoms worse than you could ever really be.'

'You don't know how bad I am, or could be.'

Loki knew that he had made one of those remarks which would lodge itself into the amber of Thor's waking memory; which would not join the chaff of all forgotten speech, those mumbles and barbs strewn about the threshing floor of his mind. Years would pass, and Thor would think again and again of what he had heard his brother say: _You don't know how bad I am, or could be._ That was admitting it. Thor would see that he had weighed wisdom and love in his palms, that he had chosen love and tossed away the other; that what he had chosen had hurt him. Thor would see that his brother was bad, after all, and he would love him yet.

Frigga, in another bend of the gardens, was clipping orchids to put in a vase: she chose blooms with fat, buttery lips and oxblood petals, or stalks ringed with rich violet, or clusters of white blossoms which put out the scent of nectar. 'I mean to give them to your father,' she told her sons, when they joined her. It occurred to Loki that Odin, too, liked Frigga's flowers, and that she plucked them because she meant to give him all the beauty that could be had before death.

Thor would know Loki for what he was, someday. Perhaps Frigga would come to know. Odin would go into that great sea knowing nothing of Loki: that he was impudent, petulant, unworthy, yes—but nothing of him and his brother, nothing of him and the war, nothing of the secret, rotting things that clung to the inside of his skin. Loki was as close as he could be to a good son. Not at all the real item, yet closer than he ought to have been, considering.

Well, he would edge a little closer yet. He clipped an orchid, and slid its stem into Frigga's vase.

 

* * *

 

'Have we any of the yellow orchids left?' Loki later asked Frigga.

It was the darkest hour and the sky was violet, dusky as if it were clouded with incense. Thor had quitted the palace, too restless in his skin to do anything but pace the corridors of the hospital; Frigga had watched over Odin till he slept, then returned to her sitting room. She drank pear tea and watched the water move through the rock and marble of her little fountain. Loki sprawled atop a divan, resting his hot cheek against its cool, smooth silk.

'The sort you and your brother liked to dig up?' Frigga quelled her smile in a sip of her tea; the corners of her eyes wrinkled. It seemed there were shining lines along the bottoms of her eyelids. 'It's a wonder you didn't put an end to the species entirely. No, they are alive and well. They've come in nicely this year.'

She crossed the room, passing out of Loki's view. Behind him he heard the crisp rustling of taffeta, then the clicking and rattling he knew as the opening of a glass-fronted bookcase. Presently she placed a book on the small table by the divan. It was, Loki rose to see, a late eighteenth century printing of a text by a twelfth century abbess: it was bound in gold-tooled calfskin, and opened to the shimmering gold of the endpapers.

'You think I require moral improvement?' Loki laughed, not unkindly.

Frigga said, 'Open to the second chapter.'

Loki did. There, covering over the lines of serif were spreads of dry petals; it seemed that a whole bed of orchids, wheat-gold fading inwards to white, had been flattened against the paper. Brittle petals between brittle pages. These Loki had not plucked; these were Frigga's own. Holding the book in his hands, Loki became aware of his brutishness. He had only to move a finger, had only to tighten his grip, to tear through the lovely thing his mother had made. His forearms stilled; his fingers went numb, white as the centers of the flowers.

'I'd not trust myself with these,' he said. 'Last time I tore them all up.'

He felt power also. He was not bound to preserve the flowers. Because he loved Frigga, he did preserve them; but there was no force holding still his wrists, no shield over the petals. If he tore them all up again, he could lie and tell her that he did not mean it, and she would believe him—for of course she believed that her sons were only brothers, and that her sons were good.

The SS Rosamunde was putting out to sea. Wine-dark water was churning beneath it; black fog was blooming from its smokestacks. Probably Algrim was checking the latch on his case, pacing in his cabin, ordering up a last cup of whisky. Probably Thor was also pacing. Probably Odin was struggling to breathe. Frigga sat next to Loki; she rubbed her hands over his hands, brushed his hair and braided it, sang him a song.

Hours passed.

'Why don't you sleep?' she asked. Together, they had long lain awake. She cradled his cheek in her shoulder; he felt the rise and fall of her body in breathing. 'You haven't rested in days; I know the look.'

'I can't.' He had long since stopped feeling the weight against the eyelids, the bodily slowing which portended sleep. If his eyes closed, something in his heart jerked, and he was awake. He was dried, hollowed. His body would move itself; all his mind had got to do was curl into the cave of his skull and wait for the world to turn. It did turn. He felt it beneath him: the grand mass burning, spinning, a living gem. Himself at the center of all that motion.

'I'll watch over you,' Frigga said.

'It doesn't matter,' he replied. He clung to her. 'But humor me. Tell me that you love me.'

'I love you,' she told him.

'Tell me that you love me always,' he said.

'Are you frightened I shall stop loving you?'

'No,' he said, but he spat it with such bitterness that it was good as a yes. He had given himself up.

'What have you done?' She knew, even in asking, that he would not answer. When he was a boy and had done something naughty and was silent about it, she would tell him that he looked like the cat who had eaten the canary. She only parted from him now. 'I will find it out.'

'When I was very small,' he began, 'I discovered the passage to the blue drawing room. Quite by accident. I could have let it alone, but I didn't.' He looked towards the panel that opened onto the passage. Frigga did not; she knew well enough where it was. 'I went through it, and jumped on the tables and the sofas, and then crept out again. I've never confessed it to anyone, in all these years. … I've felt so wretched for it.'

'Darling,' she said. 'I would have forgiven you then, if you had told me.'

'Well, forgive me now.'

'I forgive you.'

'And tell me you love me always. Do.' He put his hands at her shoulders; he looked into her eyes, though her copper-glint gaze purpled the inside of his head. 'You haven't got to mean it.'

Taking his hand in hers, she said, 'I love you always, Loki. … I only regret that my love is not enough to win your honesty.' And with a brush of her thumb along his knuckles, she loosed his hand.

'I don't lie to you,' he said, 'in the way that I lie to other people. It wasn't a lie about the blue drawing room.'

'You do lie to me.'

'Yes.' He was shocked his lips were not bloody; the pain he felt in speaking was more searing, more whole, than the pain he had felt the morning before. This, of course, was the pain of telling the truth. 'But because I love you,' he said, 'not because I want to hurt you.'

'It hurts me not to know my son,' she said.

He told her, 'It would hurt you more to know him.'

And if he told her? Could he not, after all, with the ordinary workings of his mouth and throat, say, 'I love your son more than I will ever love anyone else'? Could he not say, 'And your son loves me, though he hates to love me, and though I have hurt him'? Could he not say, 'I have hurt a great many people, and I have liked to do it'? A curl of the tongue around the voice, and all of those secret, rotting things would wash away.

Such a thin membrane intervened between the world in which she knew nothing and the world in which she knew all. Loki had only to vomit up the glass, to heave out the truth from himself, and the membrane would split. But far be it from him.... He had so molded the structure of his mind, the speed and purpose and direction of its channels, that to remove the dense, glowing core of the lying-impulse would be to blast the whole thing apart. It would be as fatal to the order of his self as the blasting-apart of a sun; its planets, their moons, the glittering bracelets of rock and ice and dust, would scatter irretrievably.

And there was a knock at the door. Frigga rose, smoothed her skirts, rustled across to answer it. The landscapes of her feeling, the plains and the crags and the rushing water, seemed to roll in on themselves, coiling more tightly as she crossed, till she was neatly-wrapped and impassive and turning open the lock. Her back was to him. Loki felt still a tingling through the air, as if she sent out a psychic prodding, feeling out for his tip into madness. He was sure that if he cried out, she would turn. He was quiet.

The attendant who had come to the door said, 'Your Majesty, I was to alert you...' The voice quieted, and Frigga leaned closer. Loki would have known it was the Rosamunde even if he had not heard the name of the ship rise up from the murmurs.

His earlier 'damn it all' seemed embarrassing, as a child's declaration that he was king of the castle. When he had said it, the Rosamunde was a bulk of metal, strong, suspended on the surface of the sea. Now it was shrapnel descending. Detritus would float atop the sea like a sheen of algae, rolling with the waves. Perhaps the water was oil-slick and burning.

Loki envisioned a body falling into the depths—a silhouette, indistinct, limbs limp, drifting through the dark water—and found that he was not stirred. Millions of things lived in that dark water; the sea was as teeming as the sea of the sky. What was the worth of one or a hundred or a thousand of those things?

Frigga had dismissed her attendant; she turned to Loki with the face she had had when telling her sons that their father was ill. The face conveyed that this was the beginning of an ending. Loki did not know how she would look at the ending proper. He hoped her face would hold still within it—as it did now, in line and shadow and gentle motion—a reserve of love for him.

 

* * *

 

Glowing from within, floating atop the darkened city, the palace itself seemed a ship whose cargo had been lighted up. Electric yellow beamed from open windows, or hissed between the slits of drapes drawn closed. There were ever so many people moving about inside; they, unlike the sleeping city-dwellers, knew about the Rosamunde, and realized then that that night was the last night of peace. Asgard slept now; soon it would wake.

Loki, pacing the corridors of the residence, did not know whether he felt glorious or wasted. For so much of his sullen youth he had toiled, struggled—whispering in ears, shaking hands under tables, setting the pieces onto the board. It was here: the clock had been started. Where he expected to feel regret or elation, one extreme or another, he felt a grey tiredness; he felt a desire to curl beneath eiderdown and let his mind slip free of its moorings. That wish was silly as the swimming and the fruit and the bonfires. The pieces had got to be moved. Loki had wanted this.

From their father's study, more in a rumbling through the floors and walls than in a drifting through the air, came the sound of Thor's voice. He was telephoning Lady Sif. 'Go to the country,' he begged her. 'It isn't safe in Valhalla. … Sif, go! Now! … Don't bother about any of that. I love you, and I would have you alive.'

Thor had not, since arriving at the residence, said anything about Loki fleeing to the country. Perhaps Thor envisioned himself and Loki fighting together: the two of them holding the palace as if it were a fortress, aiming rifles out of the windows of the front room, stealing swords from the Long Hall and slashing through a plague of Jötnar. Loki envisioned them dying together: hands clasped, skin slick with blood, eyes for the last time meeting. Thor would not have thought to imagine that.

'Well,' Loki said, standing at the threshold of the study, leaning against the door-frame. Thor had rung off. 'There's one Aesir safe. As long as you've got your woman stored away, you can damn the rest of them. I don't imagine Asgard expects much more from its prince regent. Ring up Jotunheim next; tell them to let their bombs loose! Open up the windows and play your fiddle for Valhalla...'

Thor's hand was still gripping the telephone receiver, and at the mention of the fiddle he flung it across the desk, flinging also a vehement cry of 'No more about the damned fiddle!' The receiver clattered against the oak, then stilled, dangling over the edge of the desk, its wire pulled taut. As if fingers had pinched the match-head, the flame of Thor's anger went out. He only smoldered, stalked across to the window and set his hands at the sill.

'All right,' Loki said. 'No more.' It was not an appeasement: what had been the sweetness of Thor's anger had gone rank. To say 'no more' was to spit the taste out, to cleanse himself. So he stood clean, silent.

'It'll be I who will address the nation,' Thor said, towards the fog over the city. Only the spires of the churches rose from the fog; dawn lighted their copper facing, giving them the look of gleaming spears.

'Because you're the one who ought to do it.' Entering the room, closing the door behind him, Loki drew near to Thor. 'It isn't Father's war—his is done with. This is ours.'

Thor turned towards Loki. Silhouetted by the red dawn, Thor appeared a prince regent as painted by an Old Master; his shoulders were taut, his jaw clenched shut, his eyes hooded. The light marked out his edges. His lips looked like lips meant for speaking, not kissing.

'What an awful joke it is,' he said, 'that I will only be who I was fated to be, after Father is dead.'

'No one is fated to be anything,' Loki said. 'Or else I'm fated to be on the wrong side.'

'You were fated to be here.' Carefully, Thor cupped the side of Loki's face; he rubbed his thumb along Loki's cheekbone.

'No,' Loki said, turning his cheek into Thor's palm, pressing close their skin. 'I chose to be here. Don't you dare mistake that.'

Their mother was at the door; Loki knew her by the pattern of her knock. He and Thor, then, became conscious of living in a sliver of time that was perhaps, to the rest of the world, already finished; they were there, they were then, they knew themselves, and yet the knock at the door meant that all could have changed. It could have been that Thor was king, or that Vanaheim had declared war. What would Thor and Loki, alone in a room, know of that? But they had got to go to the door.

Before that, they kissed. It was less to give pleasure than to search each other, as though they might find a second door. When the kiss began to run long, when the thrill and heat of it faded, they knew that there was only the one. They looked at each other afterwards, with their hands still clasped to each other's faces; something strange passed between them, a shiver or a turn, and they parted.

Frigga was accompanied by an attendant, who bore a silver salver brimming with telegrams. The first was a message from King Freyr of Vanaheim, expressing his regrets that he had had to declare war on Jotunheim. There had been hope for peace yet, it was written, though now no longer.

Loki felt an embarrassing impulse, rising from his stomach to his throat, to weep. He bit his lip, looked to the ceiling, and so staved it off. That would be the end of his weeping; so he decided, so he compelled himself. He was no longer the sort of man who would weep, or the sort who felt things that brought him to weep. He was the sort of man who said, 'So it is,' standing still as a statue in a niche.

 

* * *

 

'What have I to say to them?' Thor asked, scratching the nib of his pen into his paper, blacking out the words he had written.

He sat on the sofa beneath one of the windows of his bedroom, legs drawn up on the cushions, jacket off and shirt half-unbuttoned, its pinstripe spattered with spilt coffee. He was sleepless, colorless, near drained of force and motion; he, like Loki, longed for the eiderdown, for the pillow, for the shutting of eyes. He would not sleep: Asgard would declare war, and Thor would announce it to the world. In Odin's study—which would become Thor's study, as Odin's people would become Thor's people—the radio men were setting out the microphone; and Thor hadn't a thing to say.

Loki, curled against Thor, put his head to Thor's shoulder. Beneath his cheek he felt the shuddering as Thor scrawled, ripped a hole into the paper with the nib, turned to a new page.

'They think I'm a damned fool,' Thor went on. 'They're right to think it; I have been a fool.'

'Tell them the truth,' Loki said.

'Just that? That I've been bloody and that I'm not fit to be king? That I ask for their faith knowing I've not earned it?'

'I don't know.'

'Is that the truth, or isn't it?'

Thor seemed really not to know. The question, however, was wondering, not begging; it was putting out a hand to perhaps catch a drop of rain. The answer might have floated between his fingers. Thor was not concerned with truth in the way that Loki was. Thor knew, beneath the tough skin of his anger and self-doubt, the truth which stood within him. Loki could not see it—he did not see through his brother's skin any more than his brother saw through his—but saw the glow of it, faint, like a spirit lamp behind a cloth.

'So there are things Father hasn't told you,' Loki said. He lifted his head; he looked at his brother.

Thor said, 'Yes. You've said it yourself, haven't you: this is ours.'

'I did say that.' The corners of Loki's mouth twitched; it was the hollow spasm of a body which could not help but put out bits of its feeling. Some part of him, now numb, might have found it funny. He did say that. Yes, he had said a great deal.

He pressed his face to Thor's shoulder, again; he nestled his nose against the curve of his neck, touched his dry lips to his skin. Beneath the skin, inside of the veins, it seemed some fiend was throbbing, convulsing; Loki licked against the movement, bit it, as if meaning to root the fiend out of the flesh. Thor only dropped the pencil and paper—sighing; he was thankful partly, weary partly—turning, taking Loki's face in his hands, kissing him full on the mouth, licking and biting in turn. Loki slid his hand into the open gape of Thor's shirt, stirring his fingers through the hair there, and Thor split their mouths apart.

'No,' Thor said, 'this isn't the time.'

'No time for love,' Loki said, laughing dully. 'What willpower. You must suppose yourself very superior to everyone else, all those statesmen and soldiers who are just now pulling their bedclothes over themselves and their wives, or rather their mistresses. And yet they're writing just as good an address as you are, that is to say no address at all...'

'I don't suppose myself superior,' Thor said. 'Better burdened, rather.'

'You _are_ only a man,' Loki said. 'A man can do what he chooses. Do you know you're not really beholden to anything? Hadn't Father let that slip? Hadn't you found it out the first time you kissed me?'

'That's you; you're the one who chooses. I'm the one beholden. I thought you had always known.'

'But you would rather kiss me.' There at last was a smile, at once beatific and cruel. The world—the sky, the sun, the motes in the air—was watching them; for their childishness, their persistence, it laughed at them, and Loki laughed along. It hurt him to stop kissing Thor, but it would have hurt ever so much more if he had never kissed him at all, if he stood before him chaste and unloved, begging. Thor could seal his affection into the plates of the earth, beneath the crushing sea. What did it matter, if he remembered? So long as memory kept afloat, Thor would always be Thor-who-loved-his-brother; Loki took comfort in the certainty of it.

For it was settled. Loki knew so even before Thor said, 'Of course I would rather,' whereupon he knew so, too.

Their foreheads pressed together: it was a meeting of minds, of a sort. They rubbed cheeks, breathed against each other's mouths, pulled their hands through each other's hair, cupped each other's skulls. Loki felt, against the soft skin of his cheek, the graze of Thor's beard; then, against his temple, the corner of Thor's mouth, its give and dampness. Thor's nose stirred the feathery curls at the side of his face, Thor's breath lifted the furrows of down at the nape of his neck. Each element of Loki's body—each hair, each nerve, each one of the multitude of cells which writhed through him—seemed to glow in response to this touching, to move away from Loki's heart and mind and float, like a handful of blown dust, towards Thor.

That was only Loki's body. His heart and mind stood still; he did not yearn. He saw, when they pulled apart, that Thor had tears caught in his lashes. So many years Loki had spent spitting, screaming, searching for how best to hurt Thor—well. Well, he had known it all along: it was to love him.

Thor kissed Loki's temple, his cheek, the tip of his nose. Then he said, 'We haven't the time.'

'Oh yes,' Loki said, 'I know'; and he rose from the sofa.

 

* * *

 

That was not the last time. They kissed again at midday, somewhere within the hot, slow-rolling hours they had long associated with watercress sandwiches, sugar-wafers and raspberry jelly and the sun on the silver of tiered trays; hours of doing nothing, of feeling pleasure, which was now utterly alien. The people in the palace shunned the lovely summer.

As the Prime Minister convened his Cabinet, Thor and Loki clutched at an hour of rest. They apologized for their absence, though there was nothing they could have done, and retreated to Thor's bedroom. With shoes off, belts and jackets dropped to the floor, shirtsleeves rolled up, fabric of shirts dampened with sweat, they lay together on Thor's bed, atop the silk duvet. It was cool there, hushed, dark; the drapes were closed, the doors locked.

Thor was asleep so quickly it seemed he dropped out of his body. Loki lay awake—stirring, sparkling. It was as if he had become god-like; as if his organs themselves produced a sort of honey upon which his mind fed, propelling him interminably. He wanted to sleep—heavens above, he wanted to stop thinking—he could not. So for a half hour he watched Thor stir his own hair with sleep-breathing. There was a man who thought nothing; who perhaps dreamed.

When they were children, Loki, incited by some slight or spat, would pull at Thor's hair, scratch his arms, and in his attempt to wound him more deeply, say, 'I hate you, I hate you.' Frigga would tear them apart, and she would tell Loki, 'Of course you don't hate him.' Because he was contrary, he said, 'I do—I do hate him—I hate you, Thor.' Had it been hate that he felt? That twist of his guts, that heat in his face? It was the same twist and heat he would feel later, with Thor's mouth at his neck and Thor's hand at his waist. The compulsion to tear his nails down Thor's arm was the compulsion to lick at Thor's mouth, bite his lip, hold him. Always it was that pull towards—he did not know what it was towards; he had never reached it, whatever it was he wanted.

He stroked his fingers along Thor's forearm, along the broad plane of skin and the veins crossing waywardly. Thor slept on. Loki envisioned himself plunging his fingers into Thor's arm as if it were water; pulling his hand up through Thor's shoulder, swirling the blood and muscle in his chest. He envisioned pressing himself against Thor, entering Thor—routing his veins into Thor's, so that the dark water inside of him would flood through Thor, pool in his heart, flow to his lungs and head and hands. Perhaps that was what he wanted: to have his bones crossed through Thor's bones, and an eight-chambered heart beating for the both of them.

They would be better as one man than as brothers. Together, they would have Loki's cleverness, his ambition, his appetite; also Thor's nobleness, his handsomeness, his love for his people and his love for the world, his capacity to forgive and forgive again. Only when small—when careless, when unaware of their places in the world—had they felt so close. From that closeness they had grown outwards, diverging. They were diverging still. Their couplings seemed only to mark out the infinitesimal space between their bodies; to shine light onto it; to say, _Look: here is where we are split._

Loki's fingertips moved through the hair on the back of Thor's arm. Wind through a field of rye, he thought. Thor began to stir. Without opening his eyes, Thor clasped Loki's hand in his own; his grip was weak with sleep, his fingers curling. Slowly he floated down from sleep.

'I could have sworn my dream was real,' he said. 'Don't you ever feel that?'

'I don't remember my dreams,' Loki said.

Putting his hand at Loki's cheek, breathing against Loki's face, Thor said, 'I want to kiss you.'

'I know,' Loki said. He closed his eyes. Something like a smile trembled through his lips. 'Will you?'

'I want to have you,' Thor said. His voice was low, rough; but it was the quietness of secret-keeping. He would not say it any louder, or say it again. It had been a question, and he waited, still and sleepy, for an answer.

Thor had said it to Loki before: desperately, imperiously, lovingly, gently, with a stroke through the hair or a nip to the collar. Always Loki had felt arousal envelop him, spreading soft fire from toes to scalp. He had liked to know that there was something Thor wanted from him. Now—he was aroused, yes, there was the flush in his cheeks, the pulse in his cock; he felt also as though his heart were slowing to a stop. He felt the sort of sadness which pressed itself into the lungs, hardened, sat like stones at the bottom of the ribcage; the sort which moaned through the blackest caverns of the body. He felt it so completely that he could not weep. He could not bear it—yet he bore it. How did he bear it? Somehow he kissed Thor, though it was like kissing him at the bottom of the sea.

Thor pressed Loki back into the bed, pressed himself on top of him, held fast to the sides of his face; he kissed Loki so thoroughly that Loki forgot about moving, and only lay supine and taken, panting into Thor's mouth. Then Loki recalled his mind to his body; he slid his hands along Thor's chest, gathered the fabric of Thor's shirt into his fists, and tugged Thor close to him. Thor's body weighed down against him; Thor did not fall into him, his skin and bone did not melt into his. It felt as if they were something shattered. Their broken edges scraped together; that is, Thor pressed a leg between Loki's, and Loki rubbed his hips against Thor's, and Thor reached a hand down to unbutton Loki's shirt.

'Fuck me.' Loki spoke into Thor's lips. He was begging—not out of lust, but out of some more urgent need. He had done everything else; the world was tipping off the edge of itself, falling into the next world; he wanted Thor to fuck him.

Quickly, inelegantly, they rid themselves of their clothes, afterwards settling naked where they had settled clothed before. Thor's skin was warm, as if he had been lying in sun; where it pressed to Loki's, it pebbled. Loki held Thor's hips between his thighs and felt Thor's cock stiff and inflamed against his. It ought to have been pleasing, that thrill of flesh-to-flesh. Well, Loki did not want soft touches, gentleness. He did not want pleasure. So he pulled at Thor's hair—

'Hm,' Thor muttered. He was cupping Loki's jaw; it was a soft touch, it was gentle.

Turning his head, shaking off Thor's hand, Loki said, 'Don't let's bother about all this. I told you to fuck me.'

'Can I not hold you?'

'No,' Loki said, and rocked his hips up against Thor's.

When Thor broke away to fetch the lotion, Loki arranged himself at the center of the bed, on hands and knees, palms pressing into the duvet. Looking down, he saw his shadow in the blue silk; it wrinkled, wavered with the pulling of limbs at the duvet—for Thor was kneeling behind him, stroking his palm along the back of his thigh, parting his legs.

'Like this?' Thor asked.

'One would imagine.' Loki bent his head forward and lifted his arse; presently he felt Thor slide his slick hand along his hole, wetting it. Gooseflesh crawled along his spine, up his neck, working loose a soft throat-groan, whereupon Thor, encouraged, pressed two fingertips into him. Quick and sharp as a slap, he said, 'I don't need your fingers. Get on with it.'

Working his fingers into Loki—eking out a betrayal, a flush to the back of Loki's neck—Thor said, 'Let me fuck you properly,' then bent to press a kiss to Loki's back. He meant, Loki knew, that there would be no other time to do it. Here they were, together; and Loki wanted something vile, brutish, and Thor had wanted really to hold him.

Loki reached behind himself, slapped Thor's hands away from him, and rolled onto his back, crossing his legs at the ankle. In long, soft, idle sweeps of the hand, he stroked from his stomach to his chest, then back again, carefully skirting his fingers around the red up-curve of his cock. Thor looked into his eyes. Numbly, Loki smiled.

'Hold me, if you like,' Loki said. 'If you can't bear to have me, after all.'

'I want you,' Thor said. It was the truth—Loki knew it—yet it seemed that Thor was pleading for Loki to believe him. It might have been pleading for something else. He pleaded with his body, too; he ran his hands along Loki's thighs, along his hips, as if he could render Loki open to him by the heat of his palms alone.

'This is awful of us, isn't it,' Loki murmured. 'It's always been awful of us. It's only that we've not known.'

Thor kept his hands at Loki's hips. 'Yes,' he said. But he wanted him.

Loki rendered himself open to Thor. He parted his legs and let Thor nestle his body between them; he soothed his hands along Thor's sun-freckled shoulders. As Thor pulled his slick palm along his own cock, Loki drew him down to kiss. Loki felt the heat of Thor's cock against his stomach, the shifting of Thor's hand; he drew his fingers through the soft hairs trailing down the knobbles at the base of Thor's neck, and shivered at Thor's shiver.

After Thor hefted up Loki's legs, held a hand steady at the back of his knee and pressed his cock into the damp, warm space between his thighs, he lingered, savoring. He bent forward, brushed his nose against Loki's nose, breathed into Loki's mouth, sought sweet passes of dry lips. His cock weighed against the inside of Loki's thigh; that sparse press of skin had Loki's jaw slackening, his eyelids lowering. From that point at which their bodies converged, heat moved upwards through Loki, pulling over his skin as fluidly as a length of silk.

Loki looked over the faint light along the bridge of Thor's nose, the stately bow of his lips, the gentle feathers of wrinkling beneath his eyes, and saw how Thor lighted up, flushed with anticipation. So close, Thor seemed incredibly like an animal—a soul caught in the deeper folds of this moving, blinking, breathing flesh. Loki tasted Thor's breath; he took it into himself, and went dizzy with it. … Well, he was an animal also. He felt it in himself: the organs, the muscle—the meat; also the skin, hair, teeth, the stubborn bone and tissue. All earth-matter, like anyone else, like Thor.

'Do it,' Loki said. 'Go on. Please.'

'All right,' Thor said. 'Here I am.'

Thor's face began to move away; Thor drew back, held Loki's legs steady, pressed the head of his cock against Loki's hole; and in one fluid forwards sweep, Thor pressed into Loki—entered him— filled him. Extraordinary, that—opening, filling of the empty place; that sense of Thor inside of him, caught, in, inescapably. Loki's chest heaved with his gasping.

'God,' Loki breathed; and inside of him Thor's living body moved, pulsed. 'Yes. Oh. … This is why.'

Thor—his lashes flickered, lips parted, tongue swept over lips—Thor knew, somehow, what he meant. This was why they were awful. Why Thor was the fiddler, Loki the monster—this. Why they kept a world to themselves: this goodness, it was heavens good, oh! Why would they ever do anything else? Why anything but such terror, terrible good? Loki gave himself up to it. His hands fell against the duvet, limp. Thor did not give up: he held fast to Loki's sides and heaved, rocked inwards, fucked as if he were trying to rend Loki's skin and burrow inside of his body.

Loki cried out as if Thor were succeeding; he crossed his calves at the small of Thor's back and so locked Thor against him, rolled his arse down Thor's cock, tipped his head back and closed his eyes and from his fluttering, swallowing throat gave long strokes of _Ah—ah—oh,_ wretched as the sounds of someone really split apart. In fact he cried out because he was whole, and alone inside of his own body. When Thor was finished with him, Thor would go again into the world. But God—! To have him! Loki thought he saw, beyond the rosy film clinging to the insides of his eyelids, their two bodies like shades, twisting fitfully.

Plunging his fingers into the mass of Loki's braid, loosening it, spilling out fistfuls of black, Thor lifted Loki's head. When Loki, with eyes closed, turned his cheek into Thor's palm, Thor said, 'Open your eyes.'

Loki's instinct was to be obstinate; he felt immediately the chest-deep thrill of disobeying Thor. But without his willing it, his eyes opened: shadows, he saw at first, and then the pull of Thor's skin over the frame of his body, the gleam of his eyes, all brighter and clearer than the shade of his mind's eye. Thor looked into him. Loki, between his eye-opening and his awareness of it, had showed Thor a glimpse of the inside of him, like a sliver through a door cracked open. However quickly he slammed the door, Thor had seen— What had he seen? He rolled his hips against the backs of Loki's thighs; he sheathed his cock in Loki; he looked as if he had seen something unspeakable. He groaned, gasped, wrung out his pleasure. His eyes in the shadows shone celestially.

'Brother,' Loki said.

Thor made a noise like a bone breaking. He could not stop his body; his head fell, his eyes shuttered, and his hips rolled on.

There was a little mercy still in Loki, some shallow pool not yet drained or dried. He drained it now: he put his hands to Thor's chest and thrust him back against the bedsheets, clambered into his lap, reached behind himself and guided Thor into him again and sunk sinuously, sighing, stroking a hand along the side of Thor's face.

Thor's eyes flickered open, closed, though even when they were open they were closed. His face turned to the side, baring the line of his neck and jaw, the curve of ear visible beneath curling hair.

Loki swept Thor's hair behind his ear. Rubbing against Thor, pressing the skin of his arse into the skin of Thor's hips, teasing at Thor's cock in slow downwards rocking, Loki bent down to press a kiss to Thor's jaw; then, with his breath falling to Thor's face, he said, 'You are so— _good_ , Thor.'

Locks of Loki's hair were falling into Thor's face, hair, shoulders; there they coiled and uncoiled, stirred and quivered, tangled. When Thor shuddered through a breath, the sound of it filled the space between their faces, and for a moment warmed the air. Thor's hands moved—soothingly, perhaps, along Loki's hips, seeming to urge their rocking onwards.

'Do you know it?' Loki asked. 'How good you are? … Do you feel good, too?'

'Mm,' Thor murmured.

Thor's breath was quickening, roughening. He was pulling Loki's hips down; he was heaving his own up against Loki, dragging his thrusts maddeningly slow. That was something Loki had begged for, once, months ago: he had sat in Thor's lap and said, 'Slower—slower—oh, so slowly it hurts, I want that. Oh, yes. Just that.' Now a moan trembled through him.

'Do you,' Loki panted. 'Tell me.' He clutched his cock in hand, stroked up his shaft in time with Thor's hip-dragging; a dim glow warmed his guts, and with his stroking, began to brighten. Thor, too: he had the flush. His lips shined with his licking them.

Thor said, 'I love you.' Then he took hold of Loki's hips and fucked him; he fucked him in the sort of slow, deep, thunderous thumps of the hips that meant he wanted Loki to feel him, to know that he had breached him and was inside of him, inhabiting him fully.

Loki did feel it. His mind faltered, limped, and with the deepest of Thor's thrusts, crumpled entirely. He felt, after that, only the pale wash of nothing; beneath it a shadow of a thought which said, Yes, yes—this is what—this, oh, what was it, oh, what I had wanted, yes.

When Thor finished—he finished inside of Loki—they kissed. Loki lapped at Thor's wet mouth and thought dimly that he was taking more of Thor into him. He was weak with pleasure; his body moved in the numb, slurring way it did when its mind had turned away from it. He was still kissing Thor when Thor put a low cry into his mouth. It thrummed through Loki's tongue and throat; he could do nothing but swallow it. Thor was finished entirely then, and they parted.

Thor eased himself down next to Loki, slid his fingertips over the reddened underside of Loki's cock. He was making to bring Loki off that way; Loki caught hold of his wrist and stopped him.

'Don't touch me,' Loki said. 'Watch me.'

So Thor shifted onto his side, elbow pressing into the pillow, palm cupping his cheek, and watched him. His eyelids lowered as if he were dropping off to sleep; but beneath them his eyes were clear, alert, lit with faint flecks of reflection. Loki took his cock in hand and worked at himself swiftly, furiously; he lifted his hips, curled his toes into the silk, pulled his lips between his teeth and leaned his head back and let loose soft puffs of breath, _hh—hh,_ frustrated and insolent. Thor's spend clung to the insides of his thighs, and he rubbed his legs together to feel it. Probably it was staining the silk.

'Can I touch here,' Thor said, skimming his palm along Loki's hip.

Loki ached. He said nothing, but quickened his pulling at his cock.

'Or here.' Thor slid his hand inwards, slipping it beneath Loki's forearm, pressing his fingertips into the yielding skin of Loki's stomach, stirring through the black hair which trailed from his cock to his navel.

Heat gathered; that in Loki's cock, at the pit of him. Through the skin of his stomach, the underside of his forearm, wave upon wave of cool thrills, lapping over one another. He turned his head to look at Thor and saw that Thor had been watching his face; so their eyes met, and a shock scraped through Loki's body, tightening his skin, pulling him into himself, drawing all strength and pleasure and feeling towards his cock.

'Thor,' Loki cried. His was the high, terrible cry of something caught. Thor parted his lips as if he meant to speak; he did not speak, for Loki was spending, shutting his eyes against the feeling, and Thor was encircling Loki's hand with his own, pressing his face into Loki's hair and kissing Loki's temple, chastely, like a brother.

For a long while they lay still, their hands clasped together and wet with Loki's spend. Their breathing shuddered, then slowed. There were things to be said, perhaps many, perhaps things neither of them would ever say if they did not say them now; but they felt they had been absolved of speaking, and so they were quiet.

After they had cleaned themselves, they slept for another hour. They woke and drank coffee and dressed. Before quitting the room, they kissed once more.

 

* * *

 

The central corridor of the residence was still. It was the sort of stillness which bore down upon the air, weighting it, pressing it into the carpets and parquetry. Thor and Loki, upon closing the bedroom door behind him, peered into this stillness, uncertain whether to stir it. In the end, Thor was the braver of them; he stepped in the direction of Odin's study. Loki caught his forearm and pulled him back.

'Wait,' Loki said. 'There's something I'd like to do.'

'I'm to write the address,' Thor said.

'I'm going. Come with me.'

In truth Thor was afraid of whatever it was that lay in wait in the study. He looked over Loki's shoulder, towards where Loki pointed; then he let Loki pull him along.

Loki led Thor out of the residence, through the reception rooms and the drawing rooms and the picture galleries and all the other places which did not belong to them. The marble and gold and pearl meant nothing then; it only marked out the space through which the two brothers moved. There was a destination.

In the Long Hall, the sun penetrated the stained glass, firing the metal of the armor, the shields, the blades; cuts of colored light dripped to the carpet, pooling, spreading into one another. Banners of arms hung faded and heavy. Schools of motes coiled around sun-shafts. Loki felt as if he had happened upon a forgotten place, some grotto hidden away beneath the earth. The air itself smelt old, over-warm and stopped-up. The palace would, in time, collapse, or be brought down—and then the air would reclaim itself, and breeze would pass through the places where the walls had been.

There would be a time when nothing of Asgard was left—when nothing of earth was left—when nothing even of the sun was left. He and Thor would not mean anything. There would be no songs. If their souls met again, they would not know who they had been, or what they had done. Still Loki wanted... All that nothing ahead of him, and he wanted.

Thor glanced at his reflection in a steel breastplate; the gold smudge of his face, emerging to the left of the etched flowers braiding up the breastplate's center, seemed to perturb him. It was as if he had been seen by someone he did not want to be seen by. He turned to face Loki instead.

'Where are you taking me?' Thor asked.

'Here,' Loki said.

He swung open the doors to the Collection Room, whose darkness enveloped them. The doors swung shut untouched, and Thor and Loki were alone but for the relics of those who had come before them. Well, what did they matter? Thor and Loki were alone.

Thor breathed as if he was somehow—obscurely, without knowing it—frightened. Turning away from the gleam of the cases, he said, 'What could you want with this place? Surely gems and things—surely all that means nothing now.'

Loki pressed his lips shut to stifle a sharp hiccup of a laugh. He turned to face Thor, and held Thor's hands in his own. 'How can you fear the Collection? It's your inheritance. It isn't the slightest bit anyone else's; it certainly isn't the slightest bit mine.'

'That's why you don't fear it,' Thor said. 'It isn't yours. You're free of it. You can come and go as you please. You came here now because you had liked to do it; you aren't chained here.'

'Am I free of it?' Loki dropped Thor's hands; Thor did not reach forth to touch him, to take his hands up again. 'Are you really so stupid as to presume that because I will never inherit—because I will never mean anything—I am free?'

'No,' Thor said. 'Not entirely, not in the way one means when one says 'free'. I only meant you're free of this; and you damn well are. It won't be your head on the block while I drag Asgard through the war. If I bring defeat, every man in the country will loathe me. Men years and years from now, men who will live thousands of years after I have died, will loathe me. What will they think of you? That you were blameless, that you had never done a thing to harm Asgard?'

'They will think that,' Loki said. 'They'll think it because I'm powerless. That isn't freedom.'

'It's absolution; that is a sort of freedom.'

'Of what have I been absolved? My right to have a hand in the fate of my own country? In the fate of the House of Odin?'

'Would to God I was absolved of that!'

'Oh,' Loki said. It was a small, soft wisp of a sound, tender from between lips only slightly parted. He felt, then, opened up to sensation; the world—the darkness and quiet of the room, the gleaming within it, Thor's gleaming, Thor's presence itself—entered into him, and all he had known dimly before, he knew fully. 'Do you mean it?' he asked. But of course Thor meant it. Thor always meant what he said.

'I was never meant to be a king,' Thor said.

'You were born to be one.'

'I was wrong, before, when I said you were fated to be here. You did choose this. Perhaps I was born for such a purpose; I wasn't fated.'

Loki turned away from Thor. He was opened up, still, and he felt everything: Thor's shifting from foot to foot, Thor's biting down on his bottom lip, Thor's sigh, the noise in Thor's throat, Thor's breathing, Thor's fear, Thor's fortune, Thor's lifting up, the turning of the wheel, the turning of the earth, the sun aloft, the stars flinging outwards, the space between them, the space between himself and Thor, himself and Thor aloft and flinging outwards, parting.

He went to the case at the center of the room, unlatched it, and withdrew the coronation crown. He half expected his hands to crumple beneath the weight of it. It was light and fragile in his palms, delicate as small bones; it shone, and his eyes stung.

'Come here,' he told Thor.

'Put it back,' Thor said. 'Damn it, put it back. I don't want it. It isn't mine.'

'Brother, please. Do one thing for me. Come here.'

Flatly, Thor said, 'You want me to put it on.'

'You will anyway, won't you?'

'Why would I, now?'

'Know yourself and your enemy; win a hundred battles without loss.'

'—Just for a moment,' Thor said, after silence.

So Thor came to stand before him; and so Loki lifted the crown; and so Thor lowered his head; and so the crown settled upon his crown. Loki's fingers drew away. Thor's hair against the crown shone in the way of sun sunk in water. All was clear, pure; the essential elements had converged.

In the glass of the case, Thor's reflection stood immovable, facing its counterpart. When Thor saw what stood in the glass, he twitched as if he meant to turn away; but the crown sat precariously on his head, liable to tip and shatter. He was still, his hands at his side, his jaw set. It seemed that around him floated millions of dark, permeable bodies, turning through the shadows, murmuring, peering in towards the light at the center of the room.

'How does it feel?' Loki asked.

With the very tips of his fingers, Thor drew away the crown. He held it before him, away from his body, as if it were rotting in his hands. Of course he could not throw it down.

'It feels like nothing,' Thor said. 'It feels like having something on top of my head. I suppose if you put it on you would think you felt like a king.'

'It wouldn't mean anything if I did it,' Loki said. 'It isn't my lot.'

'Then what are we here for? For me to force you to envy me? What do you want? Surely not to see me taking what you would have for yourself.'

'I wanted you to be grateful,' Loki said. 'I wondered whether you wouldn't turn tail and run from yourself—well! Now I know the Crown Prince for what he is.'

'I'm your _brother_ ,' Thor protested.

'I know,' Loki said. He did not waver; he stood with chin lifted and his hands at his sides, seamless and remote. 'If only I weren't. How little you would protest your duty, then. You might even have thought yourself a king. Imagine. But you chose to love me. You weren't bound to me any more than you were bound to that crown; you chose me for yourself.'

'I said I am your brother. How could I have chosen you?'

There Loki smiled distantly, as if peering at a figure cresting a faraway hill. For a moment he thought of sunspots over wildflowers, the scent of autumn, wind winnowing through tall grasses; then the black of the Collection Room enclosed all that, like a hand closing over a stone. When his vision returned, he saw the pull at Thor's mouth that meant he knew how he had chosen him.

'Do you want me to give you up?' Thor asked.

'Does it matter? You won't.'

'I wish that I wanted to.' There was a break in Thor's voice, like a split through rotted wood or a crack through thick glass. 'What sort of a son am I, wearing my father's crown while he is on his deathbed? What sort of a prince am I?'

'What sort of a king will you be? That is the question, isn't it? Be triumphant, be good, be worthy, and no one will give a damn what sort of a son you were.'

'I want to be good,' Thor said. 'You tell me I am; I suppose it's all mocking.'

Dear Thor. He did not see it: he was good, he was good, he was unfit because he was good. The boy king golden, he would be; white flowers in his hair, and loving dearly. What would come of it? Peace? … No. Wretchedness! Too much light. That was the sun on the glass: too much light, the sort that left spots of violet—great bleeding bruises. The blood beneath the skin....

Stepping nearer Thor—closing in on him—Loki said, 'They say that a king's body is his country.'

'So they say,' Thor said.

'Well.' Loki reached across the space between them; took a step closer yet; slipped his gentle fingers between Thor's and the crown, taking hold of the base of it. 'What of the mind? … Won't it be your mind which becomes the mind of the country? Following along in its own fashion...'

'You would rather it be yours.'

'Yes,' Loki said. 'But of course we know otherwise. —So it is.'

'Is it so?'

'Isn't it?'

'You can have it,' Thor said. 'You can have what you like. Take it.'

'I will,' Loki said.

'Will you promise?'

'Oh goodness no. I'm not the one who promises. But I will say “I will”.'

Thor said, 'I believe you,' and it was so. He would have said 'I love you,' too, or 'I promise,' if Loki asked him. But all the bodies in the world were moving; all the bodies in the sky. The years were growing shorter; also the days, the hours. No hour so long as this hour. And somewhere ahead of him, the end of the songs. Before then, there was everything to be taken. So much— The stars— For another time.

The muttering shades turned their backs on the brothers. Thor's palms pressed to the backs of Loki's hands. Loki felt Thor's blood beat through their skins; he supposed that Thor felt his. It was the same blood anyway. And above their blood, and above their hands, the crown was steady, bright, aloft. And what else, then? What country? War? They two were at peace. They were brothers bridged; so that, then.

 

* * *

 

The sun, entering through the windows of the study, laid four soft golden rectangles against the wall opposite. In the shadows between these frames of light stood the men who stood for Asgard: the chiefs, the ministers, the generals, who had convened to come before Thor. At his father's desk, situated before the rightmost window, Thor sat straight, full, whole, his palms against the wood and the sun over his shoulders. Between his palms were a radio microphone and the paper on which his address was typed.

'Thirty seconds, sir.'

Thor swallowed; from where he stood at the left of the desk, Loki saw the shift in shadows on his throat. He reached out to touch Thor's shoulder; a gentle brush of fingers, and he withdrew his hand and stood waiting.

'Ten seconds. … Five. Four.' The count went silent; three fingers were held up, then two, then one. A spot of red light shone from the microphone.

The air moved; the shadows shifted; the rectangles of sun stood still. Without stirring, Thor glanced to his left. Then, breathing in measure, he returned to the paper before him.

'I come to you now,' he began, 'not only as a prince of the realm, but a son of the country, and a son of my father. As a boy, I often heard stories of my father's war. I admired his courage and his wisdom. Yet I was saddened that there should have ever been blood spilt. I hoped that when I became a man, it would be within my power to preserve the peace of this country. It is with deep regret that I tell you the peace is broken. Today we are at war with Jotunheim...'

Time passed. The rectangles grew longer, dimmer. Against Thor's hair, the sun grew redder. When Thor had finished—the spot of light had gone out—he stood from the desk, turned to the window and looked to the sky.

'We'll win,' Loki said, quietly, so that none but Thor could hear.

'I know,' Thor said.

Thor did not turn from the window; he did not see that the door to the study opened. Across the threshold, from within the dark corridor, came the Archbishop of Valhalla, fixed and even, and Loki knew that Odin was dead. … Yes, he saw it now. The room had altered—perhaps brightened. The rectangles shook with their own glowing—or Loki's hands shook. —And what would the fjord look like, and the gardens, snow, the night sky?

Then—so it was. Loki said it to himself; the words were not stillness now but motion. It was so! A great warmth entered him. Was that it, he wondered? That warmth, the crown? It must have been. A thin shudder sparkled from his toes to his scalp, and there the crown alighted. He shut his eyes, did not smile, opened his eyes and saw what belonged to him.

'Brother,' Loki said.

There was silence so absolute that the light seemed to ring out, bright as the chiming of glass. When the archbishop knelt, each man followed suit; the shadows were filled with grey, suppliant bodies. The brothers alone stood in sun. Loki did not kneel, but took Thor's hand; and together, bound, they turned.


End file.
